If you aren't painting UV's in PS do you care what they look like?

1stAnd10

I recently grabbed a copy of MARI Indie and I have ZBrush that I can polypaint in. If I'm painting my textures in these programs, and not painting the 2d representation in Photoshop, do I care what the UV's look like?

Just curious to see what the opinions are. Thanks.

throttlekitty

If by that you mean "Can avoid doing a good job on the UV unwrap and layout?", then the answer is still yes, you should care, at least for your final model.

If it's the high poly sculpt, then no, UVs don't matter on that model for polypaint.

BagelHero

If you're going to bake the high poly down, or paint on the low poly?
Yes. The UVs are just as important.

EarthQuake

If you're going to paint entirely in some sort of app that uses projection painting, you can be a little more lax with your uvs, but not in the traditional sense, you still need to make uvs with a good balance of minimal distortion and minimal seams, and if you're creating game art, minimal waste space. However, you may not need to spend quite so much time when packing to ensure that common elements are near to make it easier to paint on in 2d.

Basic rules like making sure straight objects are straight and not randomly rotated in your uv layout also apply, because otherwise your texture will look worse. You need more pixels to represent an angled line than you do to represent a straight one.

Amsterdam Hilton Hotel

if you ever do work that anyone else ever might have to work on after you, please care about UVs!

ZippZopp

or if you ever plan on attempting to get a job at a game studio you had better know your UVs and how to properly lay things out.

if it is for personal stuff, you can go at it however you wish.

jgreasley

If you're painting in 3D in Mari (and you're brave) your UVs can be packed however you like, I've seen very large VFX assets from famous movies that have been painted with UVs that look like Polygon Soup.

If you're certain you can do everything you want in 3D then using polygon packing isn't as crazy as it sounds. It allows you to ensure totally uniform texel density and nice shaped UV polygons. It does preclude any UV space tiling, but Mari has Tri-planar projections that work in 3D space that will tile seamlessly across any UV layout.