Shit, nice layout on those UVs, conte. 256'll be a snap after working exclusively with 128s and smaller for the last few weeks. Slaught, thanks again for the SDKs, these'll be fun. You're like a damned modelling machine.
Here is what the model looks like at stage 1. I just wanted to layout proportions and see how many polys the hair would eat up. Let me know what you think. Thanks. Alex
Depends on the art style. Hand painted still relies on intelligible UV layouts. If you can get all your painting done in 3d, then I suppose you could do away with it. But overlapping is still a thing in packing, and grouping helps there.
Each triangle can have only a single location in the space of a single UV channel. If you want to layer two textures onto the same triangle, but using different UV layouts, that's where you would use another UV channel.
Final layout of all the meshes. Still fiddling with the lighting because I think I can get more out of them. Then it's some decals, some small VFX, and the part I'm most excited to get to: getting stuff to animate on the screens!
The layout looks a lot better! I think someone suggested this up top, but you could make more presentation shots of the assets you made for the scenes that are dark and then people looking at the portfolio can see the detail of what you've done.
I have not entirely ruled out adding some plant life to break it up but at the moment I'm using the reference more for basic layout and feel, And attempting to create a more interesting architectural style and color palette than that of the initial reference.
Can you export these in other formats, like OBJ? It'd be great to design and test layouts in this, and then export them and fancy them up for other engines after you know it works. Also, wish we had something like this for Source.
Xnormal is a good way to go. To be clear, you don't transfer UVs from highpoly to lowpoly. Instead you use the UV layout on the lowpoly to capture the normals (via a normal map) and the colors (via a diffuse map) from the highpoly model.
Hey man, so I aplogize for the dreadful paintover, its late here, but I thought the major problem with the current scene is its compositioon is lacking, now my paintover still lacks quite a lot, but hopefully the layout works better.