Organic seamless models Uvs and texturing

drwbns

Hello everyone. I've been looking for some good resources on hiding seams for organic creatures but I can't find much. I have a character that has some seams that I'd like to cover up as best as possible using multiple UV sets. I remember seeing years ago a good tutorial about creating different UV sets to hide seams but I can't find the tutorial anymore. If anyone can point me to some good resources I'd appreciate it.

oglu

Just use a 3D painting tool. No need to hide seams.

drwbns

I used Substance already but the seams are clearly visible. Even during painting, the seams are visible and the brush didn't clearly move over the seams. I've been finding some information about even using multiple UV sets with 3d Coat or Mudbox because Substance doesn't support it. Just stuck about how to properly handle hiding the seams. Thanks for any help.

m_asher

This is a hard question to answer without seeing your bake settings and your UV layout. It does looks like you have some stretching/distortion, though, which can make hiding your seams harder with certain texturing techniques.

Neox

oglu said:

Just use a 3D painting tool. No need to hide seams.

ideally you still "hide" your seams where they naturally are in the mesh you are working on. that doesnt work for naked people but for clothing or hard surface it makes sense to not artificially complicating things with seamplacement in the middle of surfaces.

And as soon as Lods are put on top you better still think about seamplacement and UV straightening, this stuff is still far from gone.

Obscura

Looks like wrong tangents or inverted normal channel though.

Alex_J

Besides the technical issues already mentioned, for clothing there is a great workflow that is perfect for when you are working with tiling patterns like this. It will put your seams where they would be in real life, assuming you construct your fabrics that way in Marvelous Designer.

https://lesterbanks.com/2016/11/marvelous-designer-uvs-maya/

It looks like you tried to use Tri-planar projection-- if you want to do realistic clothing, I think it's best to plan early on for the UV layout and retopology so that you apply your textures as close to real life fabric construction as possible. Just makes everything easier. Tri-planar projection is more appropriate for very noisy things, like maybe a reptiles skin or a patch of dirt, but not so much for a very simple pattern like woven fabric.

drwbns

Thanks Obscura, you were absolutely right. I flipped the Y on the normal map and it was all good. Thanks!

oglu

Neox you are right. Hiding seams is still part of the workflow but we dont have todo crazy things like in the past. 

I was in cinematics char mode where you have so many seams its impossible to "hide" them all.