Frusturating UVW Unwrapping
polycounter lvl 11
I fairly new to 3ds max and I've been trying to create my own assets for my projects. I've have followed and read numerous tutorials and I swear I follow them correctly but something always goes wrong for me when I try and unwrap stuff.
I'll be streaming http://www.livestream.com/scizz on live stream May 5th around 8 or 9 PM EST so anyone who's interested in trying to help me figure out what I'm doing wrong would be a big help.
Edit: I'll end this stream and try again some other time. I kept running into problems and I'm assuming it has to do with how I built the object in the first place. I'll either make a new thread or just edit this one with pics on my progress and problems. Thank you to the people who joined and tried to help. = )
I'll be streaming http://www.livestream.com/scizz on live stream May 5th around 8 or 9 PM EST so anyone who's interested in trying to help me figure out what I'm doing wrong would be a big help.
Edit: I'll end this stream and try again some other time. I kept running into problems and I'm assuming it has to do with how I built the object in the first place. I'll either make a new thread or just edit this one with pics on my progress and problems. Thank you to the people who joined and tried to help. = )
Replies
Sorry if the image is kinda of small, I just use print screen unless there is some other way.
Since this is going to be a small object, should I just make the low poly a sphere. That's what I was suggested. Because as I was unwrapping the person said that I was making things to difficult. But even if I make the low poly just a sphere and unwrap it, how will I texture the buttons on the front?
As far as I can tell you don't have specific problem, like asking 'If I make a sandwich how will I butter it?'
Quadspheres are great if your going to go sculpt, no poles and no tris, but I'm not sure a quad sphere is going to give you a nice crisp line. It will also put your seams in places that aren't really optimal for this kind of object.
I think a normal sphere with some additions would be fine. I mean there isn't much to normal map here other than the button. The normal map won't fake the indent that well at least not on the silhouetted edges, so he should model the indent, that leave just the button...
300-ish polys, could go lower or higher...
This gives you two hemispheres to unwrap and a strip around the middle. Very little stretching, UV seams here you have smoothing breaks, everyone wins?
That's my 2 cents.
If your wondering, this is how I made the original pokeball.
[ame]
And also, after I tried the quad sphere idea for my low poly, for some reason I got this:
I think its because when I baked my textures, this black line actually appeared on them:
So I don't know, I'll keep trying.
Edit: I just read a message I got from Artifice that further explained what you said. I'll try that when I get home. Thank you = )
I ended up with this:
And this is what I end up with in UDK:
Does anyone know why this is?? I feel like its just something I have to fix in photoshop.
The latest issue seems to be insufficient edge padding, you can adjust this number up higher when baking. More than likely you're rendering at a really high resolution and UDK is capping it at 1024px and because there isn't enough padding the background is bleeding into usable/visible area.
The full solution is to use a more appropriate size, something 1024 or lower, and to always pad it because textures are always mip-mapped at some point and we always need to keep that in mind and make sure things look good at whatever level its set to.
Related links that explain it further:
http://wiki.polycount.com/EdgePadding
http://wiki.polycount.com/MipMap
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It also looks like you had it set to output into the material instead of just rendering to files.
It also looks like you might of messed up the map setup in the 3pt shader but again, so small and blurry its hard to tell.
It would be easier if you posted the files or screen shots instead of 10min+ videos, after watching the mandatory commercial I only made it about 2min before I started skipping around and closed it. I tried making it through again on my lunch but its painfully long...
2nd there just isn't much resolution to capture the detail. You can get around this by changing your UV layout and possibly your low poly object.
3rd if you're going to keep this layout and bump up the resolution to 1024 you would get better results (but that isn't really ideal you could map this with a 256 if you're smart about the UV layout. But as is, you should weld a lot of the seams.
You should also ditch the 3pt shader for this particular test. It's an awesome shader but it might be screwing you up.
Instead set up a standard material. That way when you export to .fbx and import into UDK you can import the material and you don't have to worry about setting it up. Also I'm not sure if you're using the 3pt shader correctly or not... Once you have the standard material applied and the normal map hooked up correctly it won't show up in the viewport you'll need to render it.
Also note that this item is going to be relatively small. About the size of a fist.
Now I circled the seams in black and some fuzzy lines as apposed to straight lines in green.
Black Lines: Is that seam problem just a matter of tweaking my texture or is that another error? Also, those seams were 10x more obvious before I removed the height map form the material that makes the poke ball.
Green Lines: Is that just because the quality I rendered out of 3ds Max (1024x1024) is too low? Or is that also just a matter of texture tweaking.
My new baked textures without mental ray:
If it looks like I'm just asking for answers instead of figuring it out myself I'm not. I'm also trying to figure things out and tweak them myself, sorry if this is getting annoying, this community is a great help though. = )
The black line is probably your lightmap. See how it looks with JUST shaded/lit mode and no textures applied.
Black line, could be a few different things, its hard to tell just what it is but you might need more padding.
The seams are pretty much hidden except from far distances which I'll fix some time later. The big ball is how its imported into UDK form Max(which I can adjust, just wasn't feelin' it at the time) but the smaller ones are the size of the actual prop, maybe even a bit smaller so a lot of detail isn't really necessary.
Is there anything you think I should fix right away that's completely obvious or do you guys think its good for now??