Texture(UVs) not using entire 0 to 1

ajr2764

Hey guys.

I've been always wondering how to do this and now I have a static mesh thats small and I dont need a square texture. Right now I have it taken up half the height of the 0 to 1 space. I dont know how I can export this out (Maya User) as a 1024x512 or 512x256 non square texture. I saw a thread here before but cant find it. Below is my mesh uvs layed out and I did some tests to see if I could get it to not stretch, but everytime it does. I also tryed to export out as a square texture and in PS change the canvas size to half the height but that squashed the texture back in maya.

Thanks.

Ben Apuna

Scale your UVs so they fill up the 0-1 space vertically.

Then apply the non-square texture.

Edit your texture in PS at the size it's supposed to be, 512x256 or 1024x512.

EDIT:

Oh maybe you meant, "how do I get a proper non-square UV template to PS to paint on?"

In that case it should be the same thing, stretch your UVs, then export a non-square UV template to PS. Not too sure it's been a while since I used Maya but that should work.

If you can export a eps file of 0-1 space then you can change the size to whatever you want when you import it into PS.

ajr2764

Thanks Ben for the info, I did a forums search and found the threads I was looking for. I fitted the uv's to half of the v space then scaled them up by 2 and exported as 1024x512 and slapped a texture on. Had to check use texture image ration in the uv editor to see the correct aspect, works great. You know I wonder does ut3 even handle non square textures.

renderhjs

That UV has has to much wasted space, if you'd straighten that fork shape to just a rectangle shell you could have something like:


and if you don't need unique UV shells you could even stack the 4 blocks on top of each other and save even more UV space for a more crispy texture on the 3d model.

Ben Apuna

Yup UT3/UDK handles non-square textures just fine.

Great UV critique renderhjs. By straightening those UVs they become much easier to paint as well.

ajr2764

Thanks for the crituque of that uvs template. Ill fix that I thought by doing that it would cause the uvs to become distorted in the area that bends around. Im still a little unsure when it comes to certain objects and methods to get the best unwrap and space. Been doing alot of unwrapping of wires and pipes that bend around corners. I seem to get distortion when I layout the uvs straight like above example.

Ben Apuna

Yeah you will get some distortion but it's worth it to save UV/texture space.

In addition to being easier to paint, normal/specular mapped edges will turn out better as straight lines of pixels will display clearer than curved lines of pixels especially when mip mapped.

It also keeps the true vertex count down provided all of the faces share the same material and smoothing group.

By sharing the same smoothing group without any UV seams a normal map can do a better job making a cylinder/wire/tube look round.