unwrapping hi-poly models quickly..tips?
polycounter lvl 18
Hey guys
Just wondering if any of you guys have an hints on how to unwrap a hi-poly model quickly or how do you go about doing it?.
My main problem is that Im finding it hard to select all the polys I want quickly,especially those that are running along the harder edges to cater for the eventural turbosmooth.
I try and use the shrink/grow in the unwrap window whenever possible but much of the time it slects to much or too little and find myself going over it to re/de select polys I didn't want it to.
I then normally planar map that area and scale in the UVW window to how i want it. Not ideal for hard crevesis and such.
Not having a slect edge loop/ring tool in the unwrap window is annoying and all,one of my most used tools while modelling and it isn't in there.
This is pure max 8,I tried polyboost as I know it had the edge ring/loop tools for UVs but it was pretty flakey.
So tips? or is it just a case of slug away and drink lots of caffine .
Cheers
John
Just wondering if any of you guys have an hints on how to unwrap a hi-poly model quickly or how do you go about doing it?.
My main problem is that Im finding it hard to select all the polys I want quickly,especially those that are running along the harder edges to cater for the eventural turbosmooth.
I try and use the shrink/grow in the unwrap window whenever possible but much of the time it slects to much or too little and find myself going over it to re/de select polys I didn't want it to.
I then normally planar map that area and scale in the UVW window to how i want it. Not ideal for hard crevesis and such.
Not having a slect edge loop/ring tool in the unwrap window is annoying and all,one of my most used tools while modelling and it isn't in there.
This is pure max 8,I tried polyboost as I know it had the edge ring/loop tools for UVs but it was pretty flakey.
So tips? or is it just a case of slug away and drink lots of caffine .
Cheers
John
Replies
edge loop/ring tool in the unwrap window is annoying
[/ QUOTE ]
you have loop and ring in unwrap mode and you should create peltseams, so you can easily select the edges with the point to point method, which is way better then simple edgeloop selection. Then you can just select the pelt chunks you want...
Use the MeshSmooth modifier since it will preserve the UVs. That way you can go back and unwrap and work on the low poly version without having the nightmare of all those polys. Don't forget you can turn the "show cage" on in the MeshSmooth Modifier Local Control rollout menu.
You could look into working with NURBS, so you are working on a high poly model in a low poly way, this carries over to unwrapping, but is a PAIN to get used to.
Good luck, I hope someone has some more trips and tricks that help a lot more than I can =P
SEKNeox:- Ive never noticed edge/ring selections in the UVW modifier under edge slection,never even noticed them before..im such a noob
As for the pelt mapping,gotta exsperiment some with it,just spent 15mins working on the famous teapot trying to familarise myself with that workflow...mixed results,not convinced its a time saver but more another method of working.
The way I doit right now is not to weld the seams together in the unwrap window but over-lap them/line them up so if I need to go back and make an edit I just slect and grow,seemingly with the same results as using the pelt chunk method...unless im missing soemthing?,which is likely
Vig- I always used to use the meshsmooth modifier but was told the turbosmooth was faster and more stable so have moved over....again whats the difference since with turbosmooth i just activitae it on/off and go back down the stack to edit poly and hit show end results to see the final thing,basically doing the same as the meshsmooth control mesh.
(*Off-topic*) your point about using hi-poly meshes purily as a worker mesh started a disscussion by myself and my 3d co-worker earlier.
I said most videogame companies seem to use the hi-poly model to genrate almost purily normal maps ,but he said that if you textured the hi-poly model up and baked the entire finished thing to a low-poly the results would proberly be better...my question then oviously was why arn't games companies doing that then? time,exspense? then we were interupted.
Is that the next step or are companies alraedy using finished cinimatic qaulity assets to bake there textures on to the low poly models,almost cutting out the need to make entire textures by hand and simply putting them through a "clean up" process instead.
Anyway cheers guys.
John
In some cases I don't think you even need to "texture it" properly like you would with an in-game mesh. Not by unwrapping it and painting a fully unwrapped texture.
I would look more towards combining procedural bases with masked textures on different UV channels, you can usually get away with planar projections for masks and just mask off generic tiling textures mapped spherically or box-mapped. I think that'd probably work pretty well for most things, and it wouldn't take long to clean up in PS if necessary.
Personally at the moment I just bake out normals, ambient occlusion, and material colours (like red for one type of metal, green for a different metal, blue for leather, white for plastic or whatever) and then use PS's colour picker to get selection ranges from that colour map, and use those selections as layer and group masks in Photoshop. Pretty fast.
There are other programs like unfold 3d that do the work better for some cases. It's the same methodlogy, select edge seams and that's all.
the good thing working with programs like modo, is that you don't destruct the uvw work when you need to fix a mesh topology.
In those days, to unwrap a hi-poly model i'ts not a secret. The main difference resides in the way you use your texture space. There are people who loves to have rectangular uvws, and others who use rotated blocks of uvws with ugly forms.
Planar, cylindrical, spheric, etc, are used right now mainly for some tasks like inorganic forms. Automatic unwrappers are also used for inorganic models.
I spent more time modeling than uvw mapping. This is a problem from the past hehe.
Same process as Blaizer said; mark seems, click unwrap, then pin some uvs and move them around and watch the uvs shift about.
http://www.blender.org/tutorials-help/video-tutorials/modelmateriallight/
that's CrazyButcher's port of the lscm unwrap in blender but he ported it to max. It's nice.
Alex
Mop:- Yeah,im using pretty standard and simplistic max shaders and masking for most of smaller detailed right now.
The problem I find is the lack of control you have if you try and do it all this way,also in most cases in order to get into the nitty gritty you would definatily need to commit to the hi-poly mesh,which then evativily makes too much model editing very clumbsy.
The other problem I personally have,put this down as organisation or what but if your messing round with alot of UV channesl as wel las proberly multi-sub shaders how do you keep track of them?
Blazier:- Max has the flatten mapping which is pretty auotmatic for none complex meshes,the problems arise when when you got alot of little bits in your model or connected lines to cater for mesh/turbo smoothing,then it just leaves the tiny corner polys lying in a nice pile in the UV window.
Another flaky solution we have come up with is get the model done,but don't add the extra connected lines for hi-poly msoothing....unwrap it as a normal low poly model and then go back over adding the connection lines with all UV preservation options on. This is flakey as some connected lines go AWOL but has worked on what my co-worker has tried it on so far.
also Intersecting as much as possible and trying to keep shapes as simple as possible would help this. then rely on ambient occlusion overlays to tell you where to paint and where not to paint,avoiding much wasted time.
Lupus/Sage:- Cheers guys will check it out when I get back to work tomorrow.
Cheers all
John