Technical Slop

Pui Pui Entry 10

Let's get busy uvw mapping. Lot's of fun ahead. Woohoo!

The plan of attack is to explode the various pieces, apply various mapping methods, and arrange things to taste. Not terribly difficult, but it can get confusing. One of the most important things to remember is to *never ever* create or destroy vertices! This will mess up the vert numbers and things will go bad in a hurry. I've done this on accident in the past, and back tracking is not fun.

Three main tools (for Max):
1) UVW Map - this is used to apply various uvw mapping methods to the mesh or selected parts of it: planar, cylinder, spherize, and a few others.
2) Unwrap UVW - this is used to move the uvw points around by hand. Very nice tool.
3) Textporter - this is to export the wireframe to a raster file.

Gonna do the armour first.

1) Isolate the armour and hide everything else.
2) Flip the armour around, grab those two back pieces, detach them, and move them to the front.
3) Here is the solar plexis and those two back pieces with UVW > Planar applied to them. The orange rectangle is the virtual texture and that little orange nib at the top of the rectangle shows were the top of the texture is.

Pretty easy so far. Time to do the pecs, shoulder, and the rest of the back. Select them, and apply Cylinder UVW mapping.

This is kind of harder to visualize, but you should be able to get it. I tossed in two red arrows to show the nib and seam. The little yellow nib is the top of the texture, and that green line is the seam between the right and left sides of the texuture.

Okay, time for the ribcage pieces. For this, I decided to move them around a bit, a tad of rotation, and cylinder map them.

Again, two red arrows showing the nib (top of the texture) and the green line (the seam between right and left). Once these pieces are tossed into Unwrap UVW, some tweaking of the points has to be done. No big deal.

Some of the points are too close and some of the points are too far. This will cause distortion when the texture is applied. Not good. What's equally not good is that I blindly moved them around. I should have done the checker trick, but I don't want to get totally anal.

Checker trick? What's that? Glad you asked.

That's the checker trick. Basically apply a checker pattern, them mess with the uvw verts visually. On the left, the vertical stretching is rather apparent. So, in Unwrap UVW, I grabbed groups of verts and moved them up-n-down until I was happy. On the right, you can see that the stretching has be greatly reduced. There are still a few uv verts that could stand some tweaking, but, like I said, I don't want to get totally anal. Those few little spots should be survivable.

Then toss all of the pieces into Unwrap UVW and arrange them in a way that makes sense. You know, in a way that easy to visualize the 2d texture to the 3d model. Here is the final wireframe at a reduced size:

That wireframe is at 250x250, but my working wire is at 500x500. Actually, any square texture can be used. I could use 1956x1956 if I wanted to, and it would look just fine. This aspect of uvw mapping could very easily turn into a long discussion about ratios, but currently not the scope of these discussions.

Take the wireframe into PhotoShop and use it as a template. Prep work in PS was pretty painless. I turned the outside black to a lighter shade of gray, set the mode to Multiply, and painted on a layer underneath it. Save it out like that as a working PSD, then export another rastor to be used on the model (with the wireframe layer turned off, of course).

There is a chunk of the raw wireframe, a chunk of a quick texture, and how it looks on the model. Pretty spiffy, eh? Although, there is still a touch of distortion going on as illustrated by the smiley face.

You should be getting a real taste of the process involved with modeling and all that. This is just one character -- imagine doing a full-length movie with high-poly character in full-blown environments. Can you appreciate it? I know I can.

More uvw mapping to come, but I'm going to step it up a bit now that you've had a pretty close look at it.

Not sure when I'll get to talking about the wrist problem that Stu mentioned. All I can really say right now is that it can be a real nightmare.

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