About UV mapping, best practices
polycounter lvl 7
Ive been doing this shit (3d gameart) for about 15 years now and lately there is a thing that bothers me. Making UVS is slow as fuck.
Im primarily a hard surface artist working for videogames and it bothers me that I may spend a whole day making UVS for an asset, say, a machinegun.
I use 3ds max basically for UVS with PolyUnwrapper 4.2.7 and my workflow is usually as follows:
Once I have all the parts of the low poly with correct smoothing groups I auto unwrap them using "Flatten by smoothing group" Relax, do some tweaking by hand maybe weld here and there then correct the smoothing groups in the low poly with "Set smoothing groups from shells" either with Polyunwrapper tool or with a script I have lying there for eons. I do that for all the objects, then select them all (all the ones that will share a textureset), apply unwrap again and do the arranging and scaling of the islands (shells) by hand, because sometimes some parts need less res than other specially on fps guns and because the "Rescale elements" tool in unwrap is broken when u have several objects withe the same modifier.
I find this process tedious and very slow, but thats the way im doing it for ages
Now my question is: Are there better tools/workflows? Ive seen some colleagues use UV layout and have used it myself a couple of times but I feel I lack the control I have in max when im optimizing uvs using mirror and/or overlapping and different scales. The pack uvs feature is a charm I admit but it packs all your shit all over the place. I tend to pack it making some kind of sense: trigger here, receiver here, grip here, and so on.
Some advice would be greatly appreciated!
Sorry for the long post
Cheers!
Im primarily a hard surface artist working for videogames and it bothers me that I may spend a whole day making UVS for an asset, say, a machinegun.
I use 3ds max basically for UVS with PolyUnwrapper 4.2.7 and my workflow is usually as follows:
Once I have all the parts of the low poly with correct smoothing groups I auto unwrap them using "Flatten by smoothing group" Relax, do some tweaking by hand maybe weld here and there then correct the smoothing groups in the low poly with "Set smoothing groups from shells" either with Polyunwrapper tool or with a script I have lying there for eons. I do that for all the objects, then select them all (all the ones that will share a textureset), apply unwrap again and do the arranging and scaling of the islands (shells) by hand, because sometimes some parts need less res than other specially on fps guns and because the "Rescale elements" tool in unwrap is broken when u have several objects withe the same modifier.
I find this process tedious and very slow, but thats the way im doing it for ages
Now my question is: Are there better tools/workflows? Ive seen some colleagues use UV layout and have used it myself a couple of times but I feel I lack the control I have in max when im optimizing uvs using mirror and/or overlapping and different scales. The pack uvs feature is a charm I admit but it packs all your shit all over the place. I tend to pack it making some kind of sense: trigger here, receiver here, grip here, and so on.
Some advice would be greatly appreciated!
Sorry for the long post
Cheers!
Replies
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/textools-toolbox-for-the-texture-artist
A lot of the 3ds Max guys I work with swear by it. The LSCM method of unwrapping is particularly effective for hard surface objects as opposed to ABF. I used to swear by RoadKill in Maya until Autodesk released their Bonus Tools with AutoUnwrap.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyhwoZTrB_s
Roadkill via TexTools will at least give you even texel density distribution to start with and allows you to do the setup work right in Max. I also don't particularly care for "leaving" the primary application to 3rd party software.
As far as scaling UVs appropriately to compensate for FPS weapon foreshortening, I've always found I just needed to do it manually to ensure square pixels over the length of the weapon.
Textools has some really useful features though so is definitely worth a look.
To be honest though, it sounds like OP has pretty much peaked as far as technique goes - I'd be willing to bet that 80-90% of that day spent doing UVs is on layout rather than getting a decent unwrap.
Short of autolayout tools I can't really see where you're going to make any significant time savings.
Maybe it's worth using autolayout tools on logical sections of the object and combining them for full layout later?
Oh, and just cos it wasn't mentioned I find UV groups to be very useful. I tend to pack related UVs into rectangles, group them and then lay out the groups. Saves a lot of titting around with sections etc.
Have to try those UVGroups myself. i did when they first came out but never used them again, have to try them out a second time. Thx!
To make it less of a chore I try to unwrap pieces as I go, so I don't have a huge lowpoly without uvs at all. I even throw in a test bake here and there to keep the problems small.
But to be honest I find uving pretty quick in contrast to modeling/shading.
It's also slow - unfold 3d is super fast.
Unfold3d has been integrated (partially) into maya since 2017 so I'd say quite a lot of studios are taking advantage of it.