[UV] - Streightening UV maps for handpainted textures

netqz

Hey guys, I'm new to the forum and the 3D world. While doing some case studies of League of Legends meshes and textures, I have noticed that they unwrap their models in a different way.

League of Legends UV:


And here is my model, and UV:


From what I understand, if I were using PBR textures, I would want to hide seams as much as possible and straighten everything that I can. So, I am curious is there a different workflow for hand-painted textures in 3D Coat, and are there some advantages to leaving UVs as presented above? Or is it just a personal preference, trading some optimization for easier painting?

Neox

Wow those LoL UVs look funky. Because i know they know how to straighten and do it. But maybe that standard was dropped eventually.

The LoL texture up there looks really wasteful and one could probably get a lot more texel density by straightening and packing it better.

There are many perks to straightening UVs in your case that would be very minimal work. Would help with stuff like diagonal pixels over seams, or LODs etc.

pior

Hmmm ... I don't think that these LoL UVs are intentional, as even the way the foliage parts with alphas are scattered around other parts makes no sense.

To me this looks more like the result of some techart post-process automatically applied to one or multiple assets after the fact, yet negatively affecting the common-sense optimisation made by the original artist. This probably answered a very specific and justified tech need (combining render passes/draw calls perhaps ?) but also clearly created some other (completely avoidable) issues in the process - most notably a huge waste of texture ressources, but also, making the assets very painful to work on for whoever comes after.

If anything that's an example of what *not* to do.

Alex_J

how was this texture got? might not be the original file, something related to process of ripping model from game? Hard to imagine hand painting a model with UV's like that. I am not expert on the subject, but I think that for hand painting, it still remains beneficial to have logically laid out UV's because it helps the painting process - sometimes easier to work in UV space rather than 3d viewport.

netqz

Thank you, everyone, for your inputs! The models were ripped from the game, I found the entire Summoner's Rift model and textures.

So generally, the safest bet would be to treat the UVs using the best practices in the industry. I was just curious because it was very different from what I expected.

And I guess it is best not to rely on ripped models for learning purposes because there is no guarantee they are a 100% accurate representation.

pior

Mmmmmmyeahno. Definitely not how these assets were originally created.

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/for-study-only-summoner-rift-3d-export-ac0a9c6676e34d1ebb184d8e93443c77

netqz

Good to know for future learning. Thank you everyone, for your time!

ZacD

The map is really designed to be viewed from one angle, and I'm assuming the modeled out a bunch of individual assets, UV'd them, laid them out in the map, then used some sort of semi automated process to split the models into square chunks for streaming, used a tool to repack the UVs and make sure the texture resolution was uniform and consistent Then they baked lighting, and painted on top of the models with the lighting to get the final hand painted textures. You can tell some of the backsides of assets were barely touched.

poopipe

that sounds entirely plausible to me.
It basically guarantees a fixed cost per tile which is quite a nice thing to have if you're making a game that needs to run on shit hardware and can't use any of the fancy new methods we have of handling memory.