Best way to uv low poly flatcolour model?
polycounter lvl 6
Hi, I'm making a bunch of small low poly assets and am just wondering the best way to uv them so that I can get the material size down as much as possible. Normally I would uv with a grid texture on and make sure each element was relative in size, however some of these little assets have large areas of plane colour mixed with smaller areas of colour and detail. Should I shrink the larger uvs down even though it will make them more pixelated?
I'm guessing there's no 'right' way, but was wondering if there were any tricks or standard procedures
Thanks for any help!
Nick
I'm guessing there's no 'right' way, but was wondering if there were any tricks or standard procedures
Thanks for any help!
Nick
Replies
If the assets are always small on screen, then you can use very small textures.
If you put a checker test texture on an asset, see which level mip it displays at the max, so then you can use that size texture. For example: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1738667&postcount=4
Some hardware will choke if you use uneven texel density, but most will not. If parts are always hidden, I shrink them down to nothing and shove them in the corner of the UV.
Mirroring and reusing texture space can save a lot.
If the art style agrees, you could use vertex color and a small re-used tiling texture on multiple assets.
In this example I've made everything the same size. I could obviously shrink down those large areas of colour (or stretch the UVs). However, I want to bake the ambient occlusion on top, so that would much up if i took this approach. ie. If i shrink down the large areas of colour, when i put the ambient occlusion on, the pixels would be more noticeable and big :-/
(hopefully that description wasn't too confusing)
thanks!
Quite a few things you can do here to save size.
1. Texture size is 1024x1024, that's a huge waste. Especially for mobile. Nothing should be above 256x256, except a rare 512 for a terrain or something huge, or maybe the UI elements.
2. You can crop down the elements of your bottles into this tiny little texture. Reuse reuse reuse! Don't be afraid to overlap and scale your UVs.
3. The nozzles have the same number of sides as the main pat of the bottle. This is bad because the blocky curvature is very obvious on the bottle but invisible on the nozzles. You want to distribute the topology better, so it's evenly chunky all over. With mobile, download size becomes an issue, as does memory. Generally, the less vertices the better.
4. You can paint the ambient occlusion directly into that little texture, instead of making a 2nd texture which eats up RAM.
5. You can make both the red and yellow bottles with 1 texture! If you make it grayscale, then use vertex color to make them red vs. yellow. You could even add a green one for pickle relish!
Im snapping to the grid so theoretically it should be exactly positioned.
thanks for your help!
N
1. Disable texture filtering. But then everything on screen will be pixelly, like Playstation 1 graphics, or Quake I.
2. Set the texture to use Clamp address mode, instead of Wrap.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb206239(v=vs.85).aspx
Edit... or you can avoid it by not UV'ing right up to the edge, just keep everything 2 pixels away.