Unwrapping - Maximizing Texture Area

jitspoe

Ok, it's been a while since I've done any modeling and things have changed a bit since the 500-polygon limit days when I did anything serious, but back then it was critical to make use of as much texture space as possible. Obviously, because there wasn't much of it to begin with.

Now I have a couple guys helping me out with paintball2 making a new player model. The guy who unwrapped it said it was better to keep the checkerboard pattern square and have wasted space than stretch it to fit. Now if the stretching caused distortions and skewing, I'd agree with him, but a straight up vertical stretch doesn't seem like it would do much harm (you'd just have to design your texture to be a bit stretched to compensate).

Here is one of the unwraps in question: the pants: http://www.planetquake.com/digitalpaint/images/devel/dpchar_pants.jpg (ignore the stray polygon).

So, I pose this question to some of you more experienced folks: Is it better to stretch or waste skin space?

Rick Stirling

Like the answer to many questions, it depends.

Do you want to pack more detail into your texture, or do you want to make life easier for whoever is texturing the model?

These days I lean more towards wasting a little space and keeping everything at the same aspect ratio. A little sqaushing and stretching doesnt hurt thoguh, especially in areas less often seen.

StrangeFate

Wasting some skin space is better imo.

MoP

I agree with StrangeFate... sometimes I've wanted to do circular designs on textures, and if the UV co-ords are stretched at all, it means I have to stretch all the designs, which is no fun to paint... and you end up with non-square pixels.

Ryno

Why not use the wasted space to map other pieces? Move those pants down a bit, and there's tons of room to map other parts of the model.

But to answer your question directly, yes, I tend to try to avoid distortion rather than use every ounce of space on the map.

jitspoe

Why not simply use a non-square high resolution texture while making the skin, then when you scale it down, change the proportions to make it square? That way the proportions would be correct while you're working on it.

Oh, and the reason I'm keeping all the parts separate is because I want to give players the ability to choose different textures for each article of clothing.

MoP

Hmm, I guess that's a valid method of working. I like to work at true-resolution when doing textures, though, so I can just save the file as it is, and instantly see how it will look when finished, rather than having to mess around with scaling and weird image sizes and stuff

Each to his own, I guess!

Rick Stirling

Mop - you can't always do that, as sometimes you dont know what resolution the final assets will be.

Ryno

Have to agree with Rick there. I know it's been debated to death, but I really think it's a good idea to do your textures larger than necessary, just in case the specs get raised. It just happened to me with a game that was supposed to be for a current console, but switched to the next gen console, I would have been screwed if I hadn't painted things at double rez. I like keeping a PSD of my working files, then copy it, resize it, and do touch ups for the actual in game asset.

MoP

Oh, yeah, absolutely - I've worked like that before. However, given the choice, I personally wouldn't do it. I wasn't referring to project artwork there, just personal preference for my own stuff.