Are these UVs Good, what makes a UV map good ?

Tripl3M

Hi guys, I used Zbrush`s UV Master, and there is just some weird shapes here, i`m going to use substance painter or quixel suite for texturing and with the Tri-planar projection the UVs doesn`t matter and i don`t have to use a UV Checker (am i right ?) but i`m not sure since i`m making this character for my portfolio so what should i consider when making UVs and what makes them perfect also i see people recommending manual packing instead of automatic, does it matter ?
Yup, they are not arranged.

musashidan

Yes, it matters very much if you're going to be seeking employment in the industry. Unwrapping is an extremely important part of the pipeline, particularly in games were UV space is limited. I can never understand why people spend weeks on perfecting the model and then look for an easy way out on the UVs.

Those UVs will work for the model in question. But won't be optimal. And you haven't learned a thing from clicking those few buttons. If you're working on a portfolio you should be using the projects as a means to honing your skillset. Cutting corners that people won't notice when viewing a 2D image in your folio might seem like a great timesaver but, really, it's a very bad habit. If you handed an auto-unwrap like that down the pipeline you might be shown the door.

Unwrapping is an art in itself and as I said, vital in the games industry as so much depends on clean UVs.

I laughed when I read this statement "also i see people recommending manual packing instead of automatic, does it matter ?"  I haven't seen any UV packing algorithm as clever as a human. Even the specialised tool Ipackthat can't do it(although it probably has the best packing I've seen yet) Auto Vs manual packing could be a difference of 30% in wasted UV space. Maybe in the future that will change, maybe not.

Tripl3M

Alright, manual packing it is :pleased: !
 
What do you mean by clean UVs ? what makes the UVs clean ?
also should i worry about the shape of the UVs when unwrapping an organic model ?

FourtyNights

Tripl3M said:

Alright, manual packing it is :pleased: !
 
What do you mean by clean UVs ? what makes the UVs clean ?
also should i worry about the shape of the UVs when unwrapping an organic model ?

Clean UVs usually means that they follow these rules such as:

- Minimal stretching
- No overlapping on unique UV islands
- Curvy or wonky shaped islands could be straight and positioned with 90 degree angles
- Enough space between islands for edge padding when using mipmaps in a game engine
- As average-sized islands as possible, compared to each other to avoid too big texel density differences
- Filling the square UV space completely without too obvious wasted empty gaps

Someone add, correct me or explain more if needed.

JedTheKrampus

I'd like to add "convenient and readable in 2D if there's any chance people will use a 2D program at any stage for this asset." Especially for freelance work you should try to at least make the bigger islands aligned with world space and arranged in a way that makes sense, while still being reasonably well-packed. Thin, long shapes should be straightened for easier packing. Consider whether you need UVs to be a particular alignment for anisotropy (e.g. for Valve's vr_standard shader in Source 2) or to be straightened for a particular straight line that will show up in your texture. If you can stack some UV islands to increase effective texel density, you should. It's OK to have slightly higher texel density on areas that will be in focus a lot, like the face of a character in a Mass Effect-like game, or the part of a gun that's closest to the player in a first person shooter. Especially on FPS guns you can get away with some variance in texel density... you want to aim for about a 1:1 ratio of texels to pixels if something is usually seen from a particular angle and distance.

Tripl3M

Okay ! .. thanks guys