Texturing In 3D Programs

Worldevour

My question is about seams. As of my underestanding if you are going to texture in a 3d program then you just need unwraped UVs even if they are divided in 1000 islands it doesn't matter.

Is it true? I see some people still care about seams even if they are texturing in a 3d program.
Because i want to split a human's body UVs in half and use the 2nd UV patch for more resolution.

Obscura

"divided in 1000 islands it doesn't matter."

It does matter because you are creating extra vertices.
Seams can also appear along UV cuts from mip mapping the textures.

kanga

You can choose auto unwrap in most programs. That creates uvs only your computer can read and edit. Its general practice to put island seams in the least noticeable place on a model. Painting in a 3d app should be seamless. No idea what you want to do to increase the texture resolution of your model.

Worldevour

In theory though there should't apear any problem with any amount of seams
Btw i'm not working for a game

Obscura

Mipmapping is always a thing, but yeah you don't really need to care about the vertex count if it isn't for a real time application, if you can manage your work with the mesh.

Obscura

Ptex uses per polygon uvmap though. I'm not entirely familiar with how further lods are handled with it but I would assume if you don't make noobish mistakes with your uvmap, it should work in a similar way. Like you keep a few pixel padding etc, it should be good, yeah. Ptex though should just work, but not sure about the correct applocation. You can also probably split it into bigger chunks.

Whats the application of the mesh?

Neox

is this about offline rendering of still frames again?

Burpee

Neox said:

is this about offline rendering of still frames again?

That's important to know,

Also clean UVs is better when you want to texuture because you can fill UV patch etc... it's like topoly, might work if it's not great but the more clean it is the better

Worldevour

I'm using Mari to paint. It's offline rendering still frames again(No games). i just want to cut my UVs without caring about where are the seams.
(I know u can unwrap seams automatically in many programs but just in case u want to cut them manually or change something.

Why cleaner is better?

Worldevour

I use OBJ files btw

sprunghunt

What are you rendering in? For offline rendering there's a bunch of texturing and UV techniques that you can use that have nothing to do with realtime rendering. 

Worldevour

I render in Arnold for maya

throttlekitty

Worldevour said:

I'm using Mari to paint. It's offline rendering still frames again(No games). i just want to cut my UVs without caring about where are the seams.
(I know u can unwrap seams automatically in many programs but just in case u want to cut them manually or change something.

Why cleaner is better?

Cleaner UVs will be important for game engines, seams will introduce extra vertices, inflating the overall "cost" of the model in performance. Auto-UVs will waste a lot of space because of the padding needed for each shell, since things will be broken up in ways that don't make sense for the model. The auto unwraps will never be optimal for realtime use. Then, if you need to make corrections to the models or UVs later, you're likely going to be in a bad position to do so. Also, some effects like Sharpen in Substance Painter will make a mess of uv borders, the more you have, the more bleed there is. I don't know if Mari has similar situations.

For offline renders like yours, you can get away with automatic uvs, but the wasted space still stands. But with UDIM, that's not as big of an issue. It's still worthwhile to learn how to do uv unwraps properly.

sprunghunt

Worldevour said:

I render in Arnold for maya

Seams will not matter at all in Arnold. You should look into using layered shaders with multiple UV's and projected textures. You can also use 3D textures like the solidfractal node. 

But that's a completely different style of creating textures to games. You should probably ask these questions on forums like CGtalk or highend3d.com. Polycount is a games forum.