UVs of long objects.

oraeles77

Today I am making a pallisade fence for a game object.

Its a pretty simple shape however it consists of a few very long UVs and I was thinking what would be the ideal UV map...

the cons are this...

1) a seam would be noticable. (I texture in Substance designer so I have to add the triplanular node to the grunge maps)

2) the poly count would be a tiny bit higher!

kanga

You probably  know this already but uvs dont like elongated polys. I'd test bake the second one and double the polycount then rebake to compare, then increase it again and so forth till you are happy with the quality.

huffer

You should use tileable strips here - scale the UV so it's to a desired resolution, even if it goes past the 0,1 range. For baking, you can make a temp mesh that fits side to side and bake with that (and texture will tile left to right). This way you don't need to break the fence in modules, you can have a really long plank (just by moving one end with Preserve UV's on). You can add 2 cuts in the middle of the texture too, with a joining (with nails or whatever you'd like) so the long plank makaes sense.

musashidan

If not using a tiling trim sheet and you want to bake it then intentionally texture a joint where you break the seam. This will mimic a real-world joint in the timber.

oraeles77

huffer said:

You should use tileable strips here - scale the UV so it's to a desired resolution, even if it goes past the 0,1 range. For baking, you can make a temp mesh that fits side to side and bake with that (and texture will tile left to right). This way you don't need to break the fence in modules, you can have a really long plank (just by moving one end with Preserve UV's on). You can add 2 cuts in the middle of the texture too, with a joining (with nails or whatever you'd like) so the long plank makaes sense.

yeah, I sort of did that thing before last week...

that bracket/support thing on that fence was a long tiled uv thing, the idea is that the character will be crawling around by a fence and through bushes so I wanted these to have a reasonable amount of detail.

oraeles77

musashidan said:

If not using a tiling trim sheet and you want to bake it then intentionally texture a joint where you break the seam. This will mimic a real-world joint in the timber.

this fence isnt timber, its metal, but I also made a timber fence last week, before we all get confused, what is a tiling trim sheet?

here is the fence I did, I didnt go overboard on substance designer to make loads of of knots in the wood etc cause I didnt want to waste time or go insane.