Questions about refining 3D model
Hello guys, I am new to 3D modelling and try to refine some friend's old model to new one.
I am encountering a problem that part of the new model UV layout is different from the old one. My friend asked me to unwrap UV to match the old texture/old model UV as the old texture has various version based on it. I knew it takes time to redo all the texture work if I choose to use the new UV.
I have tried to do move the new UV to match the old one, but the faces are always unfit the texture/out of checker scale.
Here's the questions, is it common to fit the old texture with new model UV? If not, what reasons should be tell to my friend about that?
The second one is that how can I deal with the texture uniform problem as 3DS MAX projected the UV out of the angle? (Considering it the UV is projected 90 degree at front directly and the red line are facing side way)
The third one is that I am stacking old model and new model in the same position for editing and referencing UV map coordinate. If I am going to move myself to Blender, can I do the same way while both of the UV showing up and unwrapping UV like 90 degree directly (or like 3DS MAX way)?
Any feedback would be highly appreciated. Thank you very much.
Replies
No Max user here sorry. So i cannot help you with the other questions. I do wonder though what you mean with new mesh versus old mesh. When the new mesh looks exact the same than the old mesh, why not simply use the old mesh with the old mapping then?
What you could do is to simply bake the texture from the old model to the new one. Then the differences in UV mapping doesn't matter. This can be done in Blender, and is worth a try. But you might loose texture quality by the bake.
Thanks for the reply, Tiles. I am sorry for my bad English to describe the question incorrectly.
The new mesh is indeed different from the old one as the I have changed the faces and shape. Thus, when I am using the UV projection, the UV layout of the new mesh is different.
On the other hand, I had a discussion with my friend and he only knew that the old mesh is aligned to a real photo (not using texture generated by 3D software) many years ago. So I think the old UV is manually adjusted to that photo.
For now, when I am want to use the UV projection generated by 3DS MAX, the UV is way off by comparing to the old one. Also, he told me to manually adjust ALL the UV coordinates to fit/similar to the old one. I think it is quite weird to do that for not using the more uniform/correct UV layout generated by software.
Regarding to your answer, yes, it is worth a try, but I just want to make sure is this kind of refining method is normal or there is a workaround. Thank you.
Ah now i see. Well, as you say, the usual method is to first do the UV mapping. And then you create the texture for this mapped mesh. Everything else will lead to distortions.
I would avoid trying to copy/reproject the UVs from the old model into the new model. Instead I would create a new optimal UV for the new model, then use Bake To Texture to convert the texture from the old model into the new model.
https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2022/ENU/?guid=GUID-B67A2495-89E4-464A-8913-35C957E950EB
Thanks for the suggestion, Eric. I will give it a try. 😀