My Unwrap attempts.
Gday everyone, i thought it was about time i stepped up and stopped being lazy and start to unwrap my mesh's instead of just throwing UV maps on it, :P im know im bad lol.
so i thought id start with simple shapes, boxes mainly here is what i have come up with:
Let me know how i have done texture wise and unwrap wise, also i know the techniques of burning, doding, texture over laying what other techniques could i use in my prosses of texturing?
Thanks!
* I just noticed the darker plank of wood is noticably repedative, i should fix that :P
so i thought id start with simple shapes, boxes mainly here is what i have come up with:
Let me know how i have done texture wise and unwrap wise, also i know the techniques of burning, doding, texture over laying what other techniques could i use in my prosses of texturing?
Thanks!
* I just noticed the darker plank of wood is noticably repedative, i should fix that :P
Replies
Sorry if it sounds harsh but its a bit of a pet hate an is just lazy and doesn't show a good understanding of texturing.
With regards to your UV's you have a lot of wasted space. You are probably only using around 80% of your map. Also, if you upload your model with a checker texture on it im pretty sure you will notice that the sqaures are different sizes. This means that your model will have an inconsistent texel resolution. That = bad.
Hope thats constructive and helps a bit.
I did also use the checker box, and where all roughly the same size.
and your right it did sound harsh. thanks anyway man
Secondly, if you wanted to reuse it why not just make one side of the crate and use more uv space then use that single side on every panel. That would have been a lot quicker and you would have also had a higher texel resolution over the entire crate.
Thridly, regardless of assett priority in a scene you are presumably doing this to learn, therefore time is irrelevant as speed comes with experiance.
Im guessing you dont particularly want to listen to my advice regardless of whether it sounds harsh or not. Unfortuantely im not going to beat around the bush just to make it sound better than it really is.
But i have my opinion on some things aswell, aswell as it is practise its also for a project of mine, its only 62 polys, its not as relevant as a building or something like that, im not going to spend as much time on a box as i would a house?
And hey im not a whizz at texturing, but a pat on the back for effort would of gone down nicer.
a crate could be a game wide object, so it may not take up the same screen space as a building in one screen shot but during the duration of a game could be omni-present.
this re-working of you texture page took litrally 5 minutes, using half the texture space (desaturated is not needed) the texel resolution is much more consistant and is better used (this would be higher resolution.
pat on the back is deffered until you get the job done ;-P
I was trying. and he was just being harsh there was no need for that.
i was just having a play around with UV unwrapping
Did you come here for constructive criticism? Or did you come here for everybody to congratulate you for completing you crate; giving you false expectations? If you want to improve your texturing abilities I suggest you listen to these guys, they know their shit.
It sounded like he was telling me off instead of helping me become better at my skills.
And i was meirly stating why i did the things i did, i wasnt biting back or insinuating that anyone was wrong, just letting him know that i wasnt being lazy like he said i was i was being conservative.
I would be really happy if someone went through the time to post as many legitemate and helpful crits as he did. He listed every single problem. A lot of these you should have realised yourself, like making the planks look different on each face, given that you gave each face a unique UV space. It is not about 'time'; a texturer in a studio is given the time to do what he needs to do to make an asset look good. I think you need to work on your attitude a little too; pats on the back come when your work shows up in the banner up top (i.e. a long time away). A job in the games industry is not about pats on the back, it is about being the best you can be and making kickass art, with no excuses. Especially not at crate level.
In no way was he being harsh. We can read it just as well as you can. And don't mistake lazyness for being conservative; each face has the same planks. They are photos for god sake, just gather a few others!
And you are twisting my words with the pat on the back thing.
Well i thought i was being conservating for petes sake! i thought being conservative would be a good thing apparently not see, im taking things in!, so thats not the problem and i dont give a fudge if you think its harsh or not, i do. I took offence to it and thats all the matters
If he was bent on being a dick, he would've just left this thread alone.
As someone who's trying to get UV unwrapping and texturing myself, I'd say you're on the right track. It might help make the sides look different if you burn spots on a different plank and maybe put a split in one or two here or there, ya know?
Just thought I'd pitch in =D
EDIT: Sorry about the criticism deal, the last 6 posts came up while I was typing this
also yea, you could have conserved a lot of space o and what size are the flats out of curiosity?
o and all of the game art forums will be harsh on you if you come expecting praise. have to keep in mind most of the people on here are amazing artists, it takes alot of hard work to catch someones eye, and inspite of the fact that the crits may be harsh, they are SERIOUSLY helpful. take it with a grain of salt. Good luck!
-Woog
not everyone is built out of stone aye.
texture size is 512 there but i made a 128 texture aswell.
Being harsh is one way of getting the message across, yes, but at the same time you're just killing any enthusiasm they might have.
Oh, and that re-worked texture would still be wasting space on a texture page, considering how its rectangular (thus not being a power of two resolution.)
As shep pointed out there are better ways to unwrap a crate. You pointed out that material creation is a weak point of yours, I agree. If you'd like some pointers I'd be happy to write them up, but if you're after idol praise then I'm afraid I'm fresh out, other then, it wasn't horrible, but wasn't great. Take what has already been posted and either fix or do something new.
I think an important skill for artists to have in this industry is to be able to detach yourself from what you make. So look at it not as "this is a piece of personal art I poured my soul into, if something is wrong with it, something is wrong with me" but more like "I made this, something is wrong with it I just can't see what it is yet."
Someone once said "art is never perfected or finished, all of it is a abandoned in a near state of perfection". That's not a cop out for doing a half ass job. It means that someone (often yourself) can do a better job if you keep working on it. At some point the time and effort it takes to keep pushing it forward becomes too great that we set it aside until later. Deadlines and other projects dictate that we pick up other things but that doesn't mean what you've done is actually finished, hopefully it will be great enough that the majority of people won't complain, but always know that someone will, and damn it they'll be right...
Last thing I have to say before I get off my soap box is, polycount is great at giving you honest feedback. I see nothing harsh or overly critical about what has been posted, that's the environment most of us (myself included) work in and actually like.
With all that said, I think you did an ok job, made a few mistakes but its not anything you can't fix or take onto the next project. If you really are interested in learning and pushing yourself forward then I look forward to seeing what you do next.
I think you have it in you to do some great stuff. So stop slackin and get crackin!
fortheweekend: I had a hard time taking some of the crits here on polycount when I first started (I never said anything about it though). You just have to learn to roll with the punches and you'll be far better for it in the end. If you want to make it in the game industry, you better not burn any bridges when your just starting out, you know?
But yeah, lets see that crate fixed already, ha ha.
there were a number of problems with your crate. It's your first crate. This is to be expected. The best thing that can happen is you post something new that you're trying to learn with and someone says "EVERYTHING YOU DID IS WRONG" and then spell out all the mistakes. Thats how you learn.
You're never going to make the same mistakes you made with this crate again, right? So you learned. You learned a lot. And when you post your first crap character, crap environment, crap gun, whatever, you're going to get a lot of feedback and learn then, too. Everyone makes tons of crap - Do you think any of the guys who post amazing shit here rocketed out of their mom's womb 3d modeling? Everyone here has made a shit crate. It's a rite of passage, not a failure on your part.
I'd argue with Vig that its the most important skill (but its in the top three) - learning to separate yourself from your work is very important. It hurts at first when you hear someone point out flaws in your work, but they're not pointing out flaws in you. The difference between someone who cares and wants to see you grow is whether or not they tell you "this is terrible because of X, Y, and Z" vs. "This is terrible."
Superkow: it wouldn't be wasting space on a 512x256 texture sheet or if you don't like rectangular textures how about a crate and a barrel fitted on one 512x512
Which forum did you think this was again?
btw it's "critique", not "critism"
Don't take stuff so personally or you will end up bitter and twisted like me:)
Here are three reasons;
1. The texture coverage will be larger and the object will have better quality textures. (already mentioned)
2. Think of this as a crate in the middle of a game level, you would expect it to be optimised as much as possible so that more important objects can appear as good quality, don't let the scene down and take up too much memory for minor assets like this.
3. As you begin to make more complicated objects you will need to get clever with unwrapping so that optimum quality is assured while allowing for variation.
Some great replies here.
I know there is alot of free space here, i could use it for flora textures or something? i could fit a few grass textures in there.
this layout that shep posted would be much better use of the space, absolutely no reason to try and keep this on a square texture. For all the time you've spent here making excuses, and reworking this, you could have made 5 more crates.
I think some other engines do some crazier shit like you could have a 1024x1280 (1280 comes from adding the power of 2 factors together, so in this case 1024 + 256) It never really made sense to me but someone on halo 3 was telling me about it. I could be totally off base, and maybe someone knows more about it than I do- but this is probably a convo for technical talk.- or for that matter already was.
cheers.
anyway, youre never going to see more than 3 sides of the crate at any given time, and even if you spun around it in the game, you wouldnt notice if one side was the same as the other. so really, using 2 sides in your texture is good enough. if i had to make this at work, theyd only let me use a 256x256. but it would be smarter to use 256x128 for this case.
and Superkow, textures dont always have to be square. as long as the width and height are powers of two, they dont necessarily have to be the same number.
dont get discouraged. his crits were not harsh, trust me. harsh is when you get a group of people talking shit about your stuff behind your back.
anyway, post up some other stuff for some new crits
http://www.artbyjessemoody.com/unwrap_rect.html
would it be a similar process for Maya?
> 2 pages already!?
I haven't had to make a crate yet, I don't feel like a real man :-(
Show it off!
I wouldn't suggest you put other objects on this texture sheet unless they are always going to be placed in the levels together. Considering its a crate and could show up anywhere by itself you probably should leave it alone and make the best of whats there.
Either that or giving that second face a little bit more difference to make it worth having.
Also, one of the strips you have at the bottom seems to be doing exactly the same thing as the one above it. It might be better to just reuse that one
edit- foretheweekend, well done on carrying on, you learn more when you force yourself to finish than by constantly re-starting. now learn to texture transfer to another crate with even better UVs then join in on the contest
thanks everyone!