Broken Tower (WIP) Need help with planning the UV tilling layout!

sepxhan

Hello everyone, 

I am a newbie here, recently working on school project which is making a cinematic for game. My task is making a broken tower, it is my first time to work with game environment so quite confuse.

Right now I am in unwrapping stage and  feeling struggle to gather all the texture in one map. I searched many methods online, but still really confuse.

Here is the looking of my model and messing unwrap uv now, still in progress and I feel kind of annoying. I am using 3ds Max 2016, gonna import it to unity in the future.

I saw the texture map online, seems using tilling textures a lot and their layout is so clean. I am wondering how to do that, basically what is the unwrap layout method,  Is anyone can help or recommend some tutorial or reference link?

Here are the examples of what I saw.


Thanks for any help and looking forward to your reply!
Han 

Carabiner

You can use more than one material on a model -- you just need to assign different materials in your 3D modeling program, and then create different materials in whatever you'll use to display it (Marmoset, Unreal, etc).

I think a big thing that makes those UV layouts clean is that they use a lot of overlapping textures. For example, all of your roof tiles probably could (and should) share a texture, or you could create a few different textures and alternate them a bit. If your tiles share the same geo (eg same amount of edges/verts/faces, can be moved around though) you can easily map one out and then transfer the UVs to the others. In Maya, that tool is called Transfer Attributes but I'm not sure what it's called in 3DS.

Once you feel you've gotten to a good place with your UV layout, could you post a larger image of just your UVs? I can provide more specific feedback that way.

Earthyn

Another thing to consider is a texture atlas, that will combine all of your textures into one big texture atlas.

Example, 4 textures at 512x512 combined into 1 texture at 4k

Just an idea

sepxhan

Thanks @Carabiner!
Thank you for the reply, it let me know another option that will make me easy, I will search for the transfer attributes. The object is in attached, so can it still work?

But I don't get what you mean in the first paragraph, Create different materials refer to collapse all the material used before and then render into one?

Some other questions, I unwrap the whole model yesterday but haven rearrange them yet.
Would it be matter if adjust the place of the vertices in uv or overlap different geometry (bit different amount of sets & vertices) ? basically what happen is the geometries isn't all the same, specially the roof planks. 

I have bake a normal map the rope and barrel, then deformed the rope (rope and barrel are not attach to the tower), If I combined them into one, I can not adjust their uv, otherwise I will bake a new Nomal map again, But it would be hard to, because the rope is deformed already. Is there any solution to that?  Here is what I got yesterday, The left side is the towel unwrap, in 0-1 uv is the rope and barrel. Another image is before pack uv of the tower.




Thanks in advance for the help, I hope you didn't get confuse for so many question I have!

sepxhan

Earthyn said:

Another thing to consider is a texture atlas, that will combine all of your textures into one big texture atlas.

Example, 4 textures at 512x512 combined into 1 texture at 4k

Just an idea

Hi Earthyn, I have heard about that method but get quite confuse, do you have any experience with that? will it effect the normal map I bake before?  basically I typed down my situation in the last floor. Hope you can take a look.

Thank you so much for your reply !

Earthyn

Hey sepxhan, your recent response is kind of confusing.

I am going to state a few things about uv's that I know

So once you bake your models, heading back and moving the uv's around is never a good idea, normally it would mean rebaking an then editing the actual diffuse.

Generally I keep my uvs inside of the 0-1 box, but I have created seamless textures that did not follow those same rules.

When Carabiner was referring to materials the second time, he was talking about in the engine you plan to render the model. If its a game engine such as Unity or Unreal, then its the materials in that engine.

Example - You create 3 materials in maya or 3dsmax. One for the roof and walls, one for the doors and windows, and one for the smaller things like the flag an such.

Then when you import the model into Unreal, you create the three materials in Unreal and apply them to the correct parts of the models.

You get to have higher resolution textures because you used 3 materials.

And finally you could even create an Atlas of those textures. 

I had an addon in Unity that did it for me, but you can easily google it. Also it will not effect your Normals

Good luck!

sepxhan

@Earthyn Thank you so much！ Once I updated will tag you for the latest change

You have mention you own way to do it， is it the same way you refer？

I feel saying thanks is not enough to express my thankful, but anyways, thanks again!

Carabiner

Hi there again!

First of all, @Earthyn has some really good points up there. One point that is not quite accurate is the pronouns: I am a woman and I use she/her pronouns.

@sepxhan  your UV map is looking good! Next time, are you able to take a screenshot of the UVs instead of taking a picture with your phone? It's kind of blurry with the phone picture.

One thing I'm noticing about your UVs is that they're often angled, for example the barrel is diagonal. You should always try to keep UVs straight if possible, unless you are doing some sort of tricky puzzling in of them -- it's just easier to paint on and you'll get less weird anti aliasing if you're using a small texture resolution, so it's just good practice to do that. In Maya, there's an tool that lets you line up UV verts in a perfect line -- I assume there's something similar in 3DS.

Looks like you still need to overlap those UVs for the roof tiles!

I went ahead and did a basic example of how I'd unwrap similar models. Keep in mind that I use Maya, so I'm not sure how to do some of these things in 3DS. I've uploaded my example to an Imgur album here so I don't clog up the thread with images! I did the barrel and some roof tiles:

http://imgur.com/gallery/jt10n

Earthyn

Carabiner said:

Hi there again!

First of all, @Earthyn has some really good points up there. One point that is not quite accurate is the pronouns: I am a woman and I use she/her pronouns.

@sepxhan  your UV map is looking good! Next time, are you able to take a screenshot of the UVs instead of taking a picture with your phone? It's kind of blurry with the phone picture.

One thing I'm noticing about your UVs is that they're often angled, for example the barrel is diagonal. You should always try to keep UVs straight if possible, unless you are doing some sort of tricky puzzling in of them -- it's just easier to paint on and you'll get less weird anti aliasing if you're using a small texture resolution, so it's just good practice to do that. In Maya, there's an tool that lets you line up UV verts in a perfect line -- I assume there's something similar in 3DS.

Looks like you still need to overlap those UVs for the roof tiles!

I went ahead and did a basic example of how I'd unwrap similar models. Keep in mind that I use Maya, so I'm not sure how to do some of these things in 3DS. I've uploaded my example to an Imgur album here so I don't clog up the thread with images! I did the barrel and some roof tiles:

http://imgur.com/gallery/jt10n

Apologies for assuming your sex, very rude and frankly uneducated! Something I am trying to correct! 

sepxhan

@Earthyn @Carabiner

Hi dear, I have discuss with our lecture in game department; He said separate the texture in lower resolution is allowable. So now I separated the texture into tree parts (top, middle, bottom). I was really confusing before since I never get in touch with game asset and unwrap, Thanks you all for the reply and answers. 

 

@Carabiner, I read your post, it's quite nice and easy to understand, thanks for sharing. Quite upset I am using mac, so sometimes I am lazy to shifting system. Here is the new layout, because the space is limited, I try to use some angled uv to keep maximum resolution, Is that okay? And I only used few overlapping, I think it might affect baking the shadow, and I gonna paint some dirt pass there.  You can have a look. Hope I can finish the texture as soon as possible!

Carabiner

Thanks! This looks generally good, although I personally would still be inclined to do some overlapping on the roof tiles (bottom left ish?). For the pieces that are bottom left, I'd definitely straighten out those UVs -- in that instance it doesn't look so much like you need space there, and straightening them out will make your life much easier!

sepxhan

@Carabiner How do you straighten out? I used to relax them after, so sometime cause deformation. And do you mean the first uv bottom left, I overlapped some there, where won't shown in the back of the tower.

Carabiner

Hmm I'm not sure in 3DS, you would have to look it up! I just know Maya, sorry. You could also get a plugin called Nightshade UV that's really good for straightening out UVs.