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WIP Tank. Unsure how to fix the UV page.

NinjaJoehenes48
NinjaJoehenes48
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NinjaJoehenes48 polycounter lvl 4
Hi.

I've been working on modeling a Type 59 for my portfolio. It's the most detailed model I've worked on up to this point in my education. I think the model came out pretty nice but I'm struggling with the UV's because it has so many pieces. Any feedback would be very helpful.







I've been using the World of Tanks HD models as inspiration for this project. I believe they use a separate texture piece for the Hull, guns, turrets and wheels as well as the texture page for the tracks. I don't know if that would be a bit excessive for my model though since it only has one turret and gun. But would a texture page for the turret and gun and another for the hull and suspension work? So far, I've tried fitting it all on one texture page and even using a 4096, the normal map I baked looked terrible. Thanks in advance for the help!
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  • Kel-Shaded
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    Kel-Shaded polycounter lvl 6
    How closely does your low poly fit?
    The problem may not be just more res
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  • razz
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    razz polycounter lvl 9
    You could separate the whole thing into 2-3 textures I think, provided you use lower res than 4k you would still win some memory. 4k is 4 times the pixels of 2k, so it's a big jump in memory. Turret, threads and rest of body sounds fine. However, as Kel-shaded mentioned, you might wanna check if it bakes correctly in the first place. I don't have a ton of experience with hard surfaces, but the way you might want to bake it is by doing an exploded scene, at least for normal maps.

    Looking forward to see where this goes.
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  • coresplendor
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    coresplendor polycounter lvl 4
    First of all there's quite a bit of wasted space in your uvs, you need to pack them better. See if there's any part of the tank that can be mirrored, parts that are occluded should also be scaled down since they are not gonna be seen, that can save up some space in the uvws. After that, for this tank, you can try to make 2-3 textures, 1 for the hull, 1 for the turret + cannon and another for the wheels and everything else. Remember to post the baked model so we can give proper feedback on that too.
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  • NinjaJoehenes48
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    NinjaJoehenes48 polycounter lvl 4
    @Kel-Shaded the high matches the low pretty well. I set up the base high poly in maya by adding support edge loops then brought it into zbrush and divided it with smooth turned off (mostly because zbrush smoothing recedes open edges unlike maya.) the zbrush dividing without smoothing did affect the normal map in that you could see some of the polygons in the normal map. Some parts of the normal map did come out pretty nicely. But some parts like the welds on top if the turret just didn't have the small detail. I'm pretty sure that's because of how poorly I used my uv space.

    @Razz exploded scene? I assume that's separating the mesh into multiple smaller pieces then baking those pieces? I was thinking of doing that, but (not sure if this is an error or not) xnormal leaves huge buckets outside the parts that it bakes. Meaning when I compile the maps, I then have to clean up the buckets. I think I will try it and just clean up the buckets then. Edit: Just looked up exploded scene and understand what you mean. I will definitely do that. Thanks.

    @CoreSplendor Thanks, i'll try that.

    I would have replied a little sooner had polycount on mobile had the post reply button. lol.
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  • NinjaJoehenes48
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    NinjaJoehenes48 polycounter lvl 4
    Here's my new uv set for the hull. 

    The other UV pages will be for the turret and the suspension with all the hull detail.
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  • Kel-Shaded
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    Kel-Shaded polycounter lvl 6
    If were only talking normal map atm, there's not that much micro detail in the mesh so I wouldn't think to go over a 2k for the whole thing.
    Keeping that in mind if you are test baking to 4k and the details aren't coming through, optimising the UV layout to give you 4 times the coverage would give you the same result you're currently seeing in a 4K.
    Actually it's a good way to test if layout is actually a problem bump up the the res and see if anything changes.
    If not start thinking about the baking angles, beveling corners, exploding the mesh, trying a different bake software, raising the polycount of the low, creating a custom envelope etc

    If it's just screws and stuff that aren't getting the res you want, rather than bump up the whole thing, bake one or two of them with a lot of UV space on their own and duplicate them around, So they're baked once on the normal map, but you can still get the AO of floating meshes that aren't part of the current mesh to add to your colour maps.
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  • coresplendor
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    coresplendor polycounter lvl 4
    That's looking better. See if those two big parts on the left of the uvw can be mirrored, that will save up quite a bit of space, in addition to that, i believe you could even scaled them down a bit since the wheels and suspension will be covering them, that way you'll maximize the uvw usage.
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