why does it need to be perfectly symmetrical? you can flip or merge UV shells even if some faces don't mirror on booth sides, in that case you only flip and merge the faces of the other half that match.
Wait so does this thing fire bullets or does it use compressed air to fire shells? Also did you go through and make a mockup/silhouette sketch before you jumped into your 3d program?
To get the base of the model, I would just make a flat plane and adjust it to the overall shape and holes, and then use some bend and FFD modifiers to get it into shape, put a shell modifier on it and then soften the edges with some chamfers.
Git is another option. There is tortoise git which gives a UI to the Windows shell. Another nice thing is you don't need a special git server running. Your git client just needs access to the repository
3ds max + Clone modifier + Shell modifier + Path Deform + Curve thickness with one click + Open edges highlight with color Maya + Camera based selection + UV editor does not lag with 50+k meshes
That's pretty much exactly how it's done. The fur is shader-driven and includes a bunch of parameters for spacing shells, painting fur direction, and adjusting opacity/density. I was actually looking at the shader with one of my coworkers on Wednesday.
Is there space between the UV shells on your box? If you have hard edges (different smoothing groups) then you need a split in the UVs and enough space between them to prevent bleeding from other nearby UVs.
Correct, that is expected. You have to fix this. Chamfer the edges of the low poly using 1 smoothing group(matching the high poly as close as possible), or split the uv shells and split the smoothing groups. Are you baking with a cage?
Game journalism isn't even journalism though, it's just insipid ranting by pretentious hobbyist that have close to no idea about what game development entails. They're also big doodoo heads and they smell like farts.
If I plan to make UVs work with 1024x512 (for example) I simply pack the uv-shell in two nearest 0-1 squares and after that scale them all to 0-1 square. Works flawlessly and easily.