Bad Texture Distortion - Help would be appreciated

FearSymm

I'm getting some pretty severe texture distortion generating uvs with UV Master. I think something is fundamentally wrong with my workflow. I'd really appreciate it if you guys could help me pinpoint where things go wonky, those who have established workflows.

So I take my highpoly, duplicate it, zremesh the duplicate to produce a relatively low poly base mesh to pull my UVs from. To do so I zremesh with adaptive on and just use the slider to find a reasonable polycount that holds enough of the general shape. I then take the duplicate, divide-project repeatedly against the highpoly till it retains the level of detail I want. I then slide back to the lowest subdivision and generate my UVs. Really crappy UVs.

Anything in there look out of sorts and would explain crappy UVs?

P.S. I've tried just about every tool available in UV Master: readjusting seams, using AO mapping, every type of density mapping...yada yada yada.

low odor

Should post this in technical talk..also post some pics showing the problem..

When I looked into using uv master, it seemed very clunky and sloppy...not to say my experiments were the be all end all.

Might want to try something else like https://www.uvlayout.com/

Sukotto

If you're making a game-res character with normal maps and other textures then you need to retopologize it by yourself, by hand, in either ZBrush, Topogun, etc. That way you will have proper topology for animation. Zremesher can only do so much. And you also need to UV it yourself either in Max, Maya, UVlayout, etc...You'll have full control over everything if you do it manually. These automated solutions aren't perfect yet and you shouldn't rely on them. You should know how to do these things yourself.

FearSymm

Sukotto: I was pretty sure this is where this discussion was headed. I'm not trying to produce an animated asset for gaming, just a fully modeled character with a full PBR set of custom textures to render in Marmoset. It's a really complex model, similar to something used in Cinematics. Retropologizing some of the more mechanical parts of the model by hand would be pretty painstaking, and I've had some success with UV Master so I'm not quite ready to abandon it entirely. I have 3dsmax and have been messing around with UVW but the results so far have been worse without divesting a significant amount of time into each UV.

The main issue is UV Master is creating wildly disproportionately sized UVs for very similiarly proportioned objects.

LRoy

Can't you just assign a checker texture and resize them yourself so they all have equal texture space? It would be far from optimal but it should be easy enough to fix the problem you're having.

FearSymm

Well now I'm using UV Master as a jumping off point and editing the UVs further in Max. I'm getting mixed results, but its mainly just due to the learning curve. I've never used UVW before. I'm confident I can get there though digging into UVW a little more.

Sukotto

Ah, fair enough. Probably not worth it for this project but for the next one maybe try UVing your base meshes before sculpting? It will make things much easier I think.

cryrid

Pics would help so we can see the result you're getting. With polygroups zbrush tends to spit out a pretty even consistency, but there are still times where certain groups will get spit out waaaaay too small, regardless of what you do to it (if you're already working on a uvmclone when that happens, try exporting the mesh and reimporting it as a new one)

FearSymm

Sukkoto - Ya I thought about doing that in the future but I'm not sure how it would work with my workflow. I assume at any point if I dynamesh or remesh my original low polys it destroys the UVs? I do these things frequently at various stages and I rely heavily on them for getting the right/even mesh density for details and textures.

Btw I really admire your work, really clean.

Sukotto

Thanks man, much appreciated!

Ah I think you're right about Dynamesh destroying UVs....hmm..I think your best bet would continue on with using UV Master and tweaking the UVs in Max. Perhaps when you separate your polygroups into UV shells, reproject them in Max. That way they will unwrap the way you want them to instead of the way Zbrush wants and you can control where the seams are more efficiently