Is this quality good enough? Please help URGENT!
Hi, there is a company interested in having me in the team so they gave me a simple texturing test, but i am unsure if this is good enough. the texture map size has to be 1024x1024 and i have to import it into UDK i have done it all but i need some crits on how it looks and if its possible to make texture maps look better at such low res. Also i am having a StaticMesh has invalid LightMapCoordinateIndex? whats that? any help please? URGENT!! anyways here is the model in game mode in UDK:
Please let me know what you think...
Thanks
Please let me know what you think...
Thanks
Replies
I would make a high-poly crate and bake maps from that to start with... doesn't look like a very nice UVW job either.. did you uvwmap the thing?
there could be a lot of things you could do differently, but I would need more info to be able to suggest any meaningful changes... so let's see that unwrap
Any info u need just ask and i will tell you.
Your unwrap is really bad... Really, really, really bad. You've got a massive amount of wasted space, each board seams to be unwrapped individually in some cases??? Everything is unwraped unique. You could probably get the same texture res with a 256x256 texture.
I would highly suggest re-uving the thing, follow some tutorials, look at other people who have made similar crate assets(there has to be hundreds around if you look).
You've gotta address this foremost.
Now, post some screenshots of your highpoly, and your lowpoly untextured but showing the wireframe overlay.
quick SERIOUSE noob question wasted space = loss of quality? or just space and memory usage?
Wasted space = loss of quality, cause the more wasted texture space you have the less pixels you have to paint on, if that makes sense.
You dont want 100% used space, as you should have some gaps inbetween for technical reasons(mipping etc). But you should use as much as you can, and re-use areas that wouldn't be noticeable as well.
I will finish it like this, and see what happens, i will tighten the space and give it a bash.
(will re model with planks just for the sake of it. Thanks guys any other stuff you think i should know please post so i have it for future reference
that unwrap is amazingly poor. I don't think you need to sculpt this necessarily, but you need to learn how to unwrap better. Repeat some areas, pack it tighter. 1024x1024 is a ridiculous amount of texture space for a crate, this should (and could) be some sort of amazing God-Crate with that kind of texture.
As for what Racer said - if this is a company that is not offering you a steady paycheck it's a scam, go back to learning. Read this article http://www.povonline.com/cols/COL209.htm
@Racer no its an indie game company. just wanted to get in so i could have some work experience in some place before i head out with the big boys (if in any chance i could make it in)
@EarthQuake: thank you, what about padding in 3Ds max baking? what does the padding actually do? thanks
Grab the outlieing pixels from the bake, and "stretch" them out X number of pixels past the UV layout. This helps for mipmapping in games, as when the object is far away the texture size is decreased. So you have this border of "padding" to ensure that when it does shrink, its grabbing the right color. 4-8 or so pixels of padding on a 1024 un map is about right, and you can crank the "padding" setting in max to 64 or something. You can never have too much padding, when it comes to the baking software.
So you've got padding in your UV layout, which is the space between individual uv chunks, and then a padding setting in your baking tool, which will fill out that empty space with a border to help the texture work better ingame.
Now, this isn't to say you should leave a huge amount of empty space and let the padding fill it in, you should always try and use as much space as possible, as creatively as possible, but keep in mind that you need a little breathing room between shapes.
There are also additional issues with how the lowpoly is constructed, right now you've got a lot of individual mesh chunks intersecting, which isn't a terrible thing on its own, but it means you've modeled, uved and textured a good deal of area that is completely occluded(stuck into another bit of the mesh or hidden). So you're wasting time/resources working like that. It makes a bit more sense to try and model it as one seamless chunk, or just a few chunks.
I would:
A. Remodel the high entirely
B. Rework the low
C. Redo the uvs(obviously)
And post your progress after each step, get some feedback before proceeding onto the next step. Once you've got all of that worked out, you can go onto texturing.
@Noors: i think what you are looking at is water from the rain that makes the crate wet? idk lol
El wut? I've never heard that, it goes against my common sense anyway O__o Why would you "have" to do this? What harm is there if you don't? Have you asked yourself these questions :P
I mean, when I unwrap stuff I try to stitch together as many adjacent faces as I can, to avoid any seams in my texture and to help with the texturing itself. Think of a camo pattern on a tank or something, you'd want to be able to paint it in one go, all over the tank, so that it wouldn't look detached and weird. For this you'd need to stitch most of the tanks UV faces together, to achieve a mostly seamless UV.
Mad urban legend, I know :d
put simply.
Highpoly: split it up as much as you can. this allows you to easily add detail locally without worrying about adding loops to the rest of the model. Its lighter, cleaner and easier to manage.
Lowpoly:
Try to keep it 1 solid mesh if you can. this means no overlapping geometry (which wastes uv space) small overlaps arent a major problem but when you get larges areas of faces being obscured you start to waste a lot of uv space on areas which will never be seen.
Common advice is also, if you have angles 90 or great, you should have a hard edge there. Though it is a lot more complex than that, for UDK, it isn't a bad rule to follow. I try not to really give out this advice, but in this case, since your model generally consists of box type shapes, it applies. You do this to avoid smoothing errors(another very complex topic).
So yeah, it sort of goes together. If you have a 90 degree angle, you should have a hard edge -> if you have a hard edge, you should have a uv seam -> it all boils down to: if you have a 90 degree angle, you should have a uv seam.
RE: padding.
Why would you bake at 4096??? 4096x4096 is 16 times more resolution than 1024x1024, there just isn't any reason you would ever need to bake that high for 1024. Generally, you should be baking, and working on your textures at the resolution the asset will end up using.
Right, with high you should use as many bits as possible to make modeling easier.
With low I try and only model parts separately when they need to animate or otherwise be removed, or when they will cause overlapping problems with the bake.