Unwrapping information/ UV islands Information

Sunarix

Greetings Polycount community!

Now the issue that i'm having isn't exactly a problem but i was just wondering...

I have this model that i completely unrwrapped, and while it looked satisfactory I couldn't help but wonder "is this truly correct?"

As the images show, the unwrap seems alright, but then i noticed the lock piece and it's small uv island group.

I did the whole process of scaling them appropriatly by organizing them, putting them into uv groups, doing rescale elements so that the other UV islands corresponded to eachother in terms of size etc, yet they(uv islands) do look awfully small. Should i scale that object's Uv group or is it just a matter of fitting a texture on it and we're done kind of situation?

 If anyone could give me some feedback/pointers I'd be most gratefull! I can also just send the file for anyone who wants to take a closer look ofcourse!

Many thanks in advance!

oh, and I apologize if this might be the wrong thread to post this in !

The Crate with random texture

The object in question

 

The entire Crate Unwrap

 

Alex_J

A few things you want to do :

1. Use your space as efficiently as possible.

2. Don't show ugly differences in texel density. In other words, we should not see very tight wood grain and then right next to it blurry wood grain. Texel density is the watch word for you to google here. If the underside of the chest will never be seen, you can scale it's UV shell down to nothing pretty much.

3. Make your textures look good.

Those are very basic pointers. No doubt you are already somewhat familiar. So if you think about the lock with those pointers in mind, the best thing might be to do a test run with your textures. You might find that the lock could use a bit more resolution -- in that case you simply scale up the UV shells, adjust things as necessary, and possibly re-bake if necessary. If it looks fine and the rest of the model has the resolution it needs, why change it?

Also, use your checkerboard to your advantage. There is some information on the wiki about different type of checkboards and how they can help you. Plus some freebie downloads. Personally I am mostly doing character work so I have a basic skin texture setup that I generally use, but it's nice to have a variety of things like a tileable wood texture, tileable fabric, and so on. Give you a sense for how much resolution you may need and how much stretching you can get away with dependent on what your texture situation is.

musashidan

To save on texture space you can stack islands after you bake.

For example: the back and front, and left and right will never be seen at the same time so you can put them in the exact same location in uv space. This will gain 30-40% texel density.

If you stack those islands and move them across to the right 1 unit before you bake using the offset transform type-in in the uv editor, and then move back after you bake the will share the same texture as the islands they are stacked upon.

Here is an old video from my YT channel showing what I mean. 
https://youtu.be/nDYLzxs7iQg

Sunarix

Thank you for the help! Certainly has given me some insight on how to do my uv's!