UV, Chamfer and Texturing
polycounter lvl 6
Hi,
I recently got into a habit I am not sure is the right thing to do: design uv shells that simplify texturing.
For example, I have this bar counter that made of wood planks:
To make texturing each planks easier, I did this to my UV (texture border highlighted):
Having these UVs makes applying materials in Substance Painter much easier: I can simply mask by UV.
Thing is, I know it's also wasting some uv space because of these extra cuts.
Questions:
1. Is it ok to design UV Shells that simplifies Texturing?
2. Should I only compromise between less UV Shells and less Texture Distortion?
And I got some side questions:
As you can see in above images, I chamfered the edges between the bottom planks (darker ones) and the side planks (orange ones). But in hindsight, maybe I should have kept them as hard edges and just split UV (which I did anyway).
3. Would you advise mixing chamfers and hard edges on a mesh?
Also out of habit: I usually duplicate the low poly, add support loops then subdivide to create a high poly for baking AO / Position / Curvature / World-space Normal. (Even when I don't add extra details for normal baking.)
4. As long as an edge is a texture border, it doesn't matter whether it's "hard" or "soft", right?
Thx in advance!
I recently got into a habit I am not sure is the right thing to do: design uv shells that simplify texturing.
For example, I have this bar counter that made of wood planks:
To make texturing each planks easier, I did this to my UV (texture border highlighted):
Having these UVs makes applying materials in Substance Painter much easier: I can simply mask by UV.
Thing is, I know it's also wasting some uv space because of these extra cuts.
Questions:
1. Is it ok to design UV Shells that simplifies Texturing?
2. Should I only compromise between less UV Shells and less Texture Distortion?
And I got some side questions:
As you can see in above images, I chamfered the edges between the bottom planks (darker ones) and the side planks (orange ones). But in hindsight, maybe I should have kept them as hard edges and just split UV (which I did anyway).
3. Would you advise mixing chamfers and hard edges on a mesh?
Also out of habit: I usually duplicate the low poly, add support loops then subdivide to create a high poly for baking AO / Position / Curvature / World-space Normal. (Even when I don't add extra details for normal baking.)
4. As long as an edge is a texture border, it doesn't matter whether it's "hard" or "soft", right?
Thx in advance!
Replies
It's a modeling question really (to me at least.)
Admittedly I mentioned SP but this isn't about how to texture in SP, it's about how to design UV and whether or not chamfer should be used in some cases.
(I think I posted this in tech talk forum and it got moved for some reasons.)
1: yes, absolutely, It's what you should do. Also consider LODs at this point.
2/3: depends
4: usually you'll find a hard edge at a uv split produces less artefacts when you're baking. It's not a hard rule and will depend greatly on what's actually happening with your UVs in your specific situation
For this specific case, since these wood planks have clear borders between each other, I am planning to use hard edges on gaps to give better texture seams, and some chamfers on the corners to give nicer shading and curvatures, do let me know if you think otherwise
EDIT: the reference image