Good Maya workflow for low-poly, pixellated style UV mapping?
polycounter lvl 3
I'm making a large number of 3D assets in Maya for use in a lowpoly game where all textures have a pixel art style and are completely unfiltered (i.e. no resampling when scaled). Because of this, I'm making my model UVs "pixel perfect" relative to the resolution of their texture. A simple example:
Note that all UVs are strictly snapped to the pixel values of the texture.
Currently I'm doing this by first doing a UV map as I would any model, and then adjust the UVs using Maya's "Pixel Snap" feature and move each UV to snap it to the pixel grid. While this works, this is obviously highly time consuming since I have to move every UV to snap it in place.
I've also tried using the "Grid" feature in Maya's UV editor, and set the values to match up with my texture resolution - this makes Maya snap all UVs at once to the pixel grid. Unfortunately, this often results in a very distorted UV shell due to the low resolution of the grid, so I end up still having to readjust each UV to proportion it better.
Is there perhaps a better approach here? It seems like Maya should be able to unwrap/smooth UV shells in a manner that snaps to a pixel grid but also takes the actual projection of the UVs into account so that it doesn't lead to more distortions than necessary (obviously, some will always happen due to the nature of 'pixel snapping' like this).
Or perhaps an external UV editor has better tools for this? The goal is to ultimately make each model UV mapped so that it's easy to draw a texture such as this:
Where along all actual edges of the model, the upscaled texture shows the full pixel with no partial 'pixels' shown unless there's a diagonal edge or when absolutely necessary. I can achieve this with my current method but it seems like way more work that needed for what is fundamentally a fairly simple end goal.
Anyone has any recommendations on how I can approach this workflow better?
Note that all UVs are strictly snapped to the pixel values of the texture.
Currently I'm doing this by first doing a UV map as I would any model, and then adjust the UVs using Maya's "Pixel Snap" feature and move each UV to snap it to the pixel grid. While this works, this is obviously highly time consuming since I have to move every UV to snap it in place.
I've also tried using the "Grid" feature in Maya's UV editor, and set the values to match up with my texture resolution - this makes Maya snap all UVs at once to the pixel grid. Unfortunately, this often results in a very distorted UV shell due to the low resolution of the grid, so I end up still having to readjust each UV to proportion it better.
Is there perhaps a better approach here? It seems like Maya should be able to unwrap/smooth UV shells in a manner that snaps to a pixel grid but also takes the actual projection of the UVs into account so that it doesn't lead to more distortions than necessary (obviously, some will always happen due to the nature of 'pixel snapping' like this).
Or perhaps an external UV editor has better tools for this? The goal is to ultimately make each model UV mapped so that it's easy to draw a texture such as this:
Where along all actual edges of the model, the upscaled texture shows the full pixel with no partial 'pixels' shown unless there's a diagonal edge or when absolutely necessary. I can achieve this with my current method but it seems like way more work that needed for what is fundamentally a fairly simple end goal.
Anyone has any recommendations on how I can approach this workflow better?
Replies