UV layout tips and tricks thread
greentooth
I thought I'd start a thread on this, as I've never come across anything that automates the process well. Maya's "layout UVs" is pretty crappy, although it can be a starting point to at least get your UVs to roughly the right size.
Anyone got any cool methods for maximising their texture space, or does everyone still just eyeball it and take the jigsaw puzzle approach? Trial and error?
I hear good things about Wings 3Ds packing tools, and the pro edition of UVlayout can also make it a bit easier. Any good results with those or others?
Anyone got any cool methods for maximising their texture space, or does everyone still just eyeball it and take the jigsaw puzzle approach? Trial and error?
I hear good things about Wings 3Ds packing tools, and the pro edition of UVlayout can also make it a bit easier. Any good results with those or others?
Replies
best is to copy the mesh, make it plane, add a planarmap and morph it back to its orginal shape hehe
and layout is something you should do by hand!
Personally I do it all with Max's Relax, hotkeyed maxscripts for aligning horizontal/vertical based off Chuggnut's scripts, and eyeballing it all.
uveditors suck anyway...
best is to copy the mesh, make it plane, add a planarmap and morph it back to its orginal shape hehe
and layout is something you should do by hand!
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HAHA the Paul Steed way!!!11one
stitch and move = hotkey s
relax = hotkey r
align vertex features (see chugnuts)
It'll cost you a $100, but it's worth the price tag. The modelling tools are also kick ass. Check it out!
Alex
They are fine for stuff like lightmaps or UV sets which are going to be automatically generated off other geometry. For anything an artist is going to have to interact with, I'd say that the "oldschool" way is still the only real option.
i always use the split function in edit poly, its way faster
and relax dialog is very importand, because the peltmap alone sucks hard^^
another tool to automate uvmapping were exporting it to obj (with seams) and put it throu unvold3d or something..^^
but the seam system is very ugly..
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Huh what? The point to point seam is way faster then using the split funtion, and stitching parts together is way easier to do as the mesh is not really split.
I do it like kp does, planars /sometimes pelts) relax, stitch, and chuggnuts tools are the functions i'm using almost all the time.
Automatic solutions never seem to do as good a job. Also they tend not to take into account the methods in which an artist would prefer to paint various sections (ie. you can get away with more stretching in less detailed areas, and you usually want to paint things on a certain angle to make it easier on the brain when painting).
They are fine for stuff like lightmaps or UV sets which are going to be automatically generated off other geometry. For anything an artist is going to have to interact with, I'd say that the "oldschool" way is still the only real option.
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What that man said. I always have this fight at work. The guys who rely heavily on the pelt/auto solutions have a harder time in Photoshop. They have these crazy layout where the shells are upside down and at generally funky angles. *Much* harder to 'read' in Photoshop and much harder to do stuff like very quickly lay down overlays for texture, grunge etc if that have a directional pattern in them. Attempting to keep things the right way up where possible makes texturing way easier imo.
1) Auto unwrap, every poly in its own space often a nightmare.
2) Artist Friendly UV's often broken across several templates so the pieces are easy to paint and easy to understand.
3) Final optimized UV's, often a chaotic nightmare but very engine friendly. Final maps are baked from the artist friendly UV's often compressing the pieces down to fit on one map.
Most of the time I'll start off with a automatic unwrap like flatten with the angle set pretty high so the pieces won't fracture as much. Then stitch some of the pieces together, relax and then pack groups of pieces and place them in squared off areas. Let me be clear I do not square off my UV pieces but put them in groups like a pipe or hand and put these groups in a certain area just for organization. I often have to pass my UV's off to 2D artists and its critical that they waste as little time as possible trying to make sense of the chaos, or don't waste time painting on tiny pieces they think are important only to find out they "missed the big E on the Eye Chart".
I color code the pieces so they have some idea of what is important and what isn't. I do this with smoothing groups, material ID's and a few scripts. Basically I select the whole mesh and assign it the "low priority material" then I select the important pieces and assign them the "high priority material". These materials have different colored custom checker patterns. I then render out checker color maps using RTT, and then render templates from the UV editor. I use specific colors for the wire and solid pieces as I have a photoshop action that sorts these pieces to different layers and pastes in the checker patterns. These final PSD templates are what I hand off.
It seems like a lot of work but actually its takes longer to explain it all then it does to do it. And if you do it right the first time everyone wins not just me.
After I pass the model off to the 2D artists I create a new optimized set I'll later bake the artist friendly to.
So yea a lot of eye balling mixed with some automated arranging.
Not to turn this into a discussion on Blender though, let's leave it at that.
Uv creation has moved on a massive amount in the last few years, but there's still not much to help the artist arrange them efficiently in the 0-1 space. Most of the automated packing tools don't work very well in my experience.
Vig, don't you find you lose some of the texture quality when you bake it to the optimised map? It's an interesting way to work, but it still involves you eyeballing the UV islands for the best fit in the end.
It really depends on the shape of your pieces if the auto arrange tools can do an effective job. It's been my experience that it does a bang up job on standard shaped pieces like cylinders cones, triangles and boxes, which when I was doing enviro art was 75% of what I dealt with, so it saved massive amounts of time, it would also space them perfectly to a specified amount of pixels which would take a few min to eyeball.
It also does a better job on smaller selections of pieces. It tends to do a poor job when you select every piece and tell it to arrange it all at once and it really falls apart when the pieces are non standard like a pelt mapped hand. So it depends on what you need to arrange if it will do a good job or not.
Oh and if I'm trying to pack pieces into the 0-1 UV space I always put the largest sections in first. You can then squeeze the smaller bits into spaces between the big bits.
I uv sections as I go, and start grouping them together in whatever way makes the most sense. I set aside any alpha bits that I can keep seperated so that when I start placing stuff, I can keep them together without worrying about alpha s creeping into other uv space later on.
Then when I'm ready to start laying them out on my page, I'll usually start with the largest piece (I keep them all the same texel scale as I can) and uniformly scale it along with the rest of the bits to fit the bounds of the page.
Next piece is the next smallest. I'll see where that fits best, try moving the two around and rotating them by 90 degrees if necessary. I keep doing this till there is little difference in scale between the smaller bits.
The smaller bits get put in wherever they fit best, and I usually try to keep them near any associated chunks. As I'm doing this, any unmirrored pieces can start to be folded into itself to save on more space. If there is one piece mirrored on top of another, I'll usually also mess with flipping them horizontally/vertically to see if they fit any better.
It mostly boils down to a puzzle game like Tetris. Most of the time I try to fill the corners in first to see how much space is left in the center. This helps let me know if I'll need to scale everything down again later.
Maybe I should make a vid of just that sometime. I finally got Max installed on my home pc after installing Veesta. :S
I do a lot of eyeballing (habbit) but i do prefer unfold3d over similar tools as UVlayout, etc.
I used max's pelt system and a few planars... but I swear I had the tetris music playing over and over in my head as I did it.