Need some help unwrapping
Hey everyone, I never tackled a model that uses a lot of UV space. I am modelling a low poly house, and have run into a problem.
As you can see, I have only unwrapped the house, have ran out of space, and at that, the house has barely any UV space for a nice looking texture.
How do you guys go about unwrapping a house? I have seen some really nice looking models on here of game art that are houses. Tell me your secrets?
As of now, I still need to unwrap the support beams, and the windows/door
Hopefully you guys can help me out, I had to delete the porch to compensate for what I have so far..which isn't much.
As you can see, I have only unwrapped the house, have ran out of space, and at that, the house has barely any UV space for a nice looking texture.
How do you guys go about unwrapping a house? I have seen some really nice looking models on here of game art that are houses. Tell me your secrets?
As of now, I still need to unwrap the support beams, and the windows/door
Hopefully you guys can help me out, I had to delete the porch to compensate for what I have so far..which isn't much.
Replies
I wouldn´t say that you ran out of space. All you need to do is to shrink down what you have in there to make more space in the green quad. Whether there´s enough texture space or not will decide the final texture size, not the checker material you have now applied. When you shrink down the UVs and the checker map tiles will get too big to do their job - and that is only for you to see if there´s any stretching in the unwrap - then you can set tiling of the checker material to a higher value.
Also, in my opinion you might want to unwrap the parts first (do one, put it on a side and go for another part), and care about arranging it on the UV layout then.
This is what I do, I unwrap each part then throw it in , and arrange, this was just slapped together after countless attempts with this outcome. The problem I am having is I am using photosources for texturing, and the wood siding I had picked out, when shrinked down to look normal with this UV layout looked like complete crap and pixelated beyond belief.I was hoping someone had some texturing techniques to help me get a nice even balanced size of the pieces , and a good use of UV space.
Actually, I just remembered I have an old model from uni. And there's two ways to go about it, either as previously mentioned, use multiple materials and tile them over the mesh, together with a texture for the unique details. Or, you could stick it all into one texture, and build it up like this instead: http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/8831/aegf.jpg
Thankyou so much for the tutorial. I am assuming you are using overlapping also? I was going to try this, however , my windows that are the same size on the model somehow are completely different sizes in the unwrap. is there any possible to automatically resize them to the same size? or am I gonna have to tweak them manually?
Yep, it's an air-tight mesh as were required by the assignment I believe. But, there's still floating elements on top of it. Normally the air-tight thing isn't anything you need to worry about though, unless it's causing you trouble with shadow-casting in-game.
Hmm, let's see. It doesn't look like you have any unwrap plugins. There's this one, textools, which is pretty handy, and I really recommend you get it.
Once installed you can use 'normalize shells' in order to get everything scaled equally.
These things are already included in the newer versions of max, but with the older ones, you won't get by without it
As a sidenote, using the relax tool with all parts selected will also correct the scale, though tends to mess up the unwrap instead.
Cheers
Kiser, genius! I cannot understand why I forgot about doing this. Thankyou everyone so far for all the help.
Could be good, could be bad, just depends on whether or not we will see the roof that often. Just something to think about.
House, barrel, and crate by me. The nice looking props are of course Epic/UDK models.
You can still save even more space in there. I threw together a quick example model for you here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3093336/example_mesh.rar
Have a look at that one and try unwrapping it the same way. I didn't include the roof or other details here, so those are also meant to go in the uv space ofc, but in a similar fashion to the walls. There's very rarely any point in unwrapping the whole surrounding walls uniquely.
And also, don't be afraid of adding in that extra detail in the mesh in order to get some unique elements in there.
I divided my roof up into small squares, each of those squares could easily share the same texture-space without any problems, depending on what your roof would look like.
So, this will require some tweaks in the mesh as well, but don't be disheartened. Having a good understanding of how this works is something that will be very useful in the future
I also recommend still that you have a look at tiling materials. As in breaking this up into multiple textures sometime in the future. These things are pretty important in environment art as you occasionally have to build very big things which would require enormous textures in order to get it all in without reusing texture-space.
The upside of tiling materials contra to breaking the model up in pieces, is that it'll save triangles. And will also let you re-use the same texture a lot of times. Which is to prefer if you're going to build very large or a lot of buildings.
Thankyou again Adam, and all the people who took the time to help me.
So far the best community I have posted my work in.