RTT - turning a few materials into one
Gday folks, alas another problem i need help with, i have made an asset for a project of mine, and altho its probably not the prefered way i got a bunch of 512 textures, and uv mapped them onto the asset, and i know i can render to texture to bake on the lights and form the textures into 1 big texture.
But when i do the auto UV doesnt use the space properly, it puts the "main textures" all the way up into the corner and leaves alot of space behind, thus making the texture resolution something shocking!
Are there any settings or tools that will auto unwrap properly, maybe according to the importance of the texture?
Screen of the auto unwrap:
http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/5378/thyei0.jpg
But when i do the auto UV doesnt use the space properly, it puts the "main textures" all the way up into the corner and leaves alot of space behind, thus making the texture resolution something shocking!
Are there any settings or tools that will auto unwrap properly, maybe according to the importance of the texture?
Screen of the auto unwrap:
http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/5378/thyei0.jpg
Replies
In Max you can use Flatten Mapping. Increasing the Face angle treshold gives you larger chunks (>> fewer seams) but will induce stretching.
Make some tests with different values and check the UVs for distortion (apply a tiling checker map to your model first).
Try to decrease spacing to something like 0.01 or 0.009 or whatever works
For best result use manual unwrap instead of auto.
See this link for more info>
http://tutorials.hourences.com/tutorialsue3lightmap.htm
ill poke around a bit more see if i can get decent results, it works perfectly it just needs better resolution.
* What about a 3rd party program like Flatiron or UV packer, to auto unwrap?
I like using a second UnwrapUVW modifier it makes things easier to edit. If you use one, you have to hit Reset UVW's each time you change channels and it has a chance to revert to the last time they where baked into the mesh via collaspe. Use two modifiers, one for each channel and it's not a problem.
Also if you need to remove a channel go Tools > Channel Info. Anything that is Map:1 Map:2 ect... is a UV channel and can be "cleared".
Depending on the shape of your pieces the auto arrange works pretty well on boxes and rectangles. It treats odd shaped pieces by their bounding box first and does some pretty complex computations to TRY and fill in the gaps but normally fails. Which is why its better to do it by hand.
If you have a lot of squared off pieces you can select only those pieces and run UVW Editor Window > Tools > Pack UV's it should do a good job of packing those pieces.
If you have a bunch of odd pieces, you're pretty much stuck like Vass pointed out =/