Help a newborn artist in the mysteries of uv mapping

ValAlexandr

Hola amigos.

I am creating a game ready character but I am a little confused of the process. This is my first attempt to create a game character so my workflow is muddy.

Basically I have put all of the character's cloth pieces into one obj and was ready to make the uv mapping but the process is full of problems. I can't map properly with all the objects together.

I am using 3dcoat as it's the easiest program for me

Any tips will be greatly apreciated : (

[IMG]http://i64.tinypic.com/dpg2yw.png[/IMG]

ValAlexandr

The image in question

kanga

Is this auto unwrap? Looks kinda junky.  How are you doing the textures? Are you going to hand paint them? If you were planning to bake the textures then the uvs here are a mess. Check out the wiki here: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Coordinates

Alex_J

Give yourself an easier time and make a much simpler character first. Or just a shirt. Like a basic rectangular t-shirt made from a couple cubes stitched together. If you are feeling froggy you could just use a single part of your character here. Just take the shirt or pants only and run through the rest of the process with it alone.

Then practice unwrapping them in the most logical way you can imagine. For me, I like to unwrap clothing the way they would be stitched together in real life. This makes it pretty neat and orderly. But really there are many considerations. Are some parts more prominent than others? Do some parts need more resolution? Do some parts need to be made straight so you can apply a tiling pattern more easily? Will the texture stretching be too much? These are all questions you can only answer yourselfl after gaining a bit more work experience. And a lot of the questions can't be answered until you do a quick test, take it into your texturing application, and just seeing how your UV's effect the textures. So it's not, "how do I do this right the first time?" It's "what is the most efficient way to test all the possibilities so i can arrive at the most optimal outcome." Semantics, I know, but it's a difference in mindset.

Next, you do your layout. Again, you are just using these few very simple shapes to easily get an understanding of the principles of neat, organized, logical packing. Don't spend much time thinking on your first go, just go with your first instinct and keep moving forward. You will learn more by going into the next step --realizing you made some unforseen mistake -- and then going back to correct that. When the primary goal is to learn, mistakes are your good friend. Get to know as many as you can.

Working on a test like this will save you the terrible frustration of working really hard to avoid mistakes on your masterpiece, going to great lengths of patience, but only too fail in the end because there is so much you didn't know that you didn't know. Also, you will build real understanding. Instead of feeling like a slave trying to remember all the master's rules, you will, through experience, learn why the common practices people espouse exist.