Uv advice for my little old humble shack

jetskee96

I am not sure how to go about uving this shack. I was going to take this into mudbox but decided I wanted to work on my texturing and use as is. How would be the best way of uving this esp the planks that stick out. the only thing that comes to my mind is to take the planks into separate islands and stack them all into 4 or 5 piles. But not sure if this is the best way. Any advice would be great.

Cheathem

I would LOVE to see a solution to this as well.

Ken Benson

Are you working off a reference?
What's your plans for this model?
Are you going to take it into UDK?
Does it need to all be one mesh or can you break it into modular pieces?
Are you going to bake anything onto it?

Personally, I like to take everything into UDK. That being the case I'd break it into modular pieces just so that the lightmaps can have enough resolution to correctly shadow the building.

You should definitely stack the strips as much as possible for your texture uv. How many separate stacks will vary your repetition. If you are adding edge detail, which you should, be sure to overlay the seams as close as possible. If you are going to bake anything, stacking is not really an option.

Honestly this looks like it will be a really tedious task. If you can take out 3/4 of the strips. I think that will look better anyway. Right now its a lot of repetition. A frame around your window and door would be nice as well.

Gestalt

I'd make a tileable texture for those walls with the planks and just use that. If you put the ceiling on the same texture (like if you have a 512x256 texture), then you would break up your UVs so that they tile vertically (by having the UVs scaled vertically past the UV space) and broken up with vertical UV seams to 'tile' horizontally (by stacking). You could also do something like have two separate tiling textures (2 256x256 textures) and vert paint the ceiling to have one texture and the wall to have the other. I'm sure there are many other ways but those are the ones that come to mind first. In general I try to use tiling, reusable textures whenever possible so this is the general thought process I'd have.

Ken Benson

Oh ya! Definitely vertex paint if you can... it will make your model a lot more expensive on your tri counts though.

Gestalt

You may even want to make the walls and ceiling different meshes with their own tileable materials if you are planning on a modular setup. You could have a tileable wall material to apply to any wall meshes you make and a tileable ceiling material for any ceilings. If you are using fbx to import and you'd like to keep everything together as one mesh, you could also have a 3rd UV channel allowing the ceiling and walls to have different tileable textures (and no UV gymnastics needed). I don't have too much experience doing that and I'm not sure what is technically the best, but these are all options.

CheeseOnToast

Oh ya! Definitely vertex paint if you can... it will make your model a lot more expensive on your tri counts though.

Vertex colour is virtually free. Each vert can hold one RGBA value at very little cost. It's second (or third) UV sets that add a lot to tri counts.

Ken Benson

CheeseOnToast wrote: »

Vertex colour is virtually free. Each vert can hold one RGBA value at very little cost. It's second (or third) UV sets that add a lot to tri counts.

I was just thinking about it from a pure model point of view, not also what it would mean for the texture. You raise a good point.

Gestalt

Does anyone know how the additional UV affects performance? Is it due to the fact that UV seams add to the vert count or is there something like an additional draw call? If I take one UV channel and distribute the same UV islands over 2 channels how would that affect performance?

jetskee96

Thanks everyone for the great answers, now I just have to let it all sink in and apply it. I will try and post updates soon.

Computron

Gestalt wrote: »

Does anyone know how the additional UV affects performance? Is it due to the fact that UV seams add to the vert count or is there something like an additional draw call? If I take one UV channel and distribute the same UV islands over 2 channels how would that affect performance?

I think it varies across engines. I read that some engines draw multiple UV sets in a separate pass.