Efficient UV mapping and texturing
Hey peeps... Can anyone point me in the right direction of either a book or online tutorial on techniques for super efficient texturing? I keep seeing people making these amazing looking textures that only cover half or part of a model and I don't seem to grasp the concept... I feel like texturing is stopping me cause I have loads of unfinished stuff cause the textures look crap and I decide to move on... anyhelp would be greatly appreciated!
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I was more looking for advice on where the best places to look are... I've seen some tutorials which say poly stacking is ok but I always thought it wasn't...
was more wondering specific books peeps have used or specific tutorials / tutorial sites or even purchased DVDs... it's getting to the point where I feel like knocking it on the head cause I don't seem to be getting anywhere...
I think it's more the theory behind how to do it... like the reasons why something would be mapped like it is... specifically character work... I get how to do all the stitching and stuff in max but placement seems to be my downfall... Blender is another story... always get confused by that... but it's not really program specifics I'm looking for... more just a general "this should be mapped this way cause of this" kind of thing...
I feel like I can model fairly competently in blender but making a good texture seems to be beyond me!
Make textures, post them here, get feedback, do again. Then you'll get better. Texturing tutorials are easy to find and they're the hard part when it comes to your models - not so much the UVs.
What you can and can't do with UVs depends on the game engine, but generally:
* UVs absolutely can overlap. They can be rotated and mirrored and scaled.
A few reasons why UV overlapping might not work:
* Light maps. Some engines want unique UVs for light mapping. This often means you can have one UV set for your textures and another for your light map, so it's generally a non-issue (you just need two unwraps).
* Baking. When you bake, you usually don't want overlaps as you'll render twice to the same part of your texture. Overlapping is usually fine here, though, after a workaround: Just decide which part of your model will bake to the overlapped area. Any other parts that overlap that area, just delete them from the baking model or move the UVs outside of 0..1 space (shifting by one unit left/right/up/down will give the same UV mapping, but it won't bake).
* Normal Maps. Maths behind normal maps is funny (you need a little maths knowledge or the right diagrams to really get it) so if you overlap or (particularly) overlap and rotate your UVs then you might get the wrong effect. But don't stress because there are ways of fixing 99% of issues using normal workflow. Just post your work as you do it if it's getting issues.
But check that wiki link. It'll get you headed in the right direction
I've got a book on making textures but it's old so doesnt really cover up to date stuff (comes with photoshop cs2 trial!) plus the bonus of being really cheap so trying to learn more about creating textures from scratch too... but that's another subject!!
Finally feel like I might get some help! woot!
Thanks for the quick and great tips. They are really helpful
http://ryan-bown.blogs.eae.utah.edu/2013/01/011413.html
Anyways, I think the best way to learn/ understand this is to start experiment with basic shapes/ simple meshes.
You should never delete polygons for a bake, as this will bend the vertex normals along the edges of the new hole, which will screw up the baked normal map.
Moving them out of the 0-1 UV space is the way to go instead.
Post some examples. I doubt efficiency is the problem, probably just bad textures. You can uv map super efficiently and still have a tiny low res texture look good. Its not just about how tight and how many pixels it maps to.