Texel Density makes bakes look bad on important areas

Bumblebee

Hey Guys,

I have UV mapped this piece here and used pack normalize to pack the UVs. Before I scaled down the unimportant part quite abithowever on the bakes the important areas like the front areas are quite pixelated even at 2k res. (some floaters). How should I combat it while still avoiding one area looking more "highres" than the other

Altea

I have the feeling you have parts that are not visible in the exterior of the gun but appears large in the uvs. Perhaps those cylinders are interior cylinders and the handle section is mostly covered by another piece.

m4dcow

The biggest issue I see is baking down the handle scales separately will waste a bunch of texel density. There are probably other issues, but try combining the handle and scale geometry in the low poly and see what sort of density you get.

Amsterdam Hilton Hotel

Bumblebee said:

Hey Guys,
How should I combat it while still avoiding one area looking more "highres" than the other

You do want parts that are visible to have more resolution than parts that won't be seen. Otherwise finite data is being spent where it won't have visual impact.

Almost all internals can be scaled down, you don't need them to look as good as the exterior parts of the gun that you see all the time.

If it's for an FPS perspective then emphasize the slide, hammer, rear sight, thumb safety and anything else that's obviously in view.

I usually group UV islands according to visibility and then scale them accordingly before packing. 

poopipe

I'd be overlapping UVs and making sure things are nice and straight myself.  You could probably get back 30% of the space doing that.

gnoop

The whole idea  of certain areas being more hires than others as a bad "unprofessional" and generally looking bad thing is  totally wrong .        It's a nature of human vision to  capture details selectively.     The whole art history is around  the selection , an ability to find and do key details while smoothing ,smearing or missing insignificant.       There is nothing wrong  with varying texel size unless  it's a really huge difference. 
  

Bumblebee

alright ill rework the uvs and scale up the parts i think is important. The thing is though when I do that and repack with the algorithm the uv is less filled somehow. Since I scaled up the parts i want bigger I untick rescale (because I dont want the stuff i scaled up get scaled down again) but the problem is that the other UV islands automatically wont get scaled up to fill the space. How can I make sure that the space is still utilized fully after the normal autpack.

Kanni3d

Bumblebee said:

 but the problem is that the other UV islands automatically wont get scaled up to fill the space. How can I make sure that the space is still utilized fully after the normal autpack.

That's because if they were getting scaled up to fill the space, that's breaking the texel density. You have the important parts scaled up, and you unchecked 'rescale', to save its texel density on repack. 

You could fix this by finding a tedious balance, or utilizing symmetrical UV's which will definitely help push more resolution, but also getting a nice full pack.

Altea

In theory there is a tool to change the scale relative between islands when packaging in the UV editor. But I can not get it working, using groups or not.

• "For example, say you group some clusters, and then select a polygon belonging to one of the clusters and set Rescale Priority to 0.5. Then you apply Pack Together or Pack Normalize to all clusters, with the Rescale option enabled. The result is that the clusters belonging to the group are half the size that they would be otherwise. (Non-grouped clusters always use a scaling factor of 1.0, or 100%.)"
  
• https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-9E98AEAC-F06F-4FAD-9091-DCD30AC9BB26-htm.html
  
• 
  

When I select a groups it remembers the number I assign for rescale priority, if I select them again I can see the number changes, but nothing happens about relative scale when packaging.