Technical Slop

Pui Pui Entry 11

Been having a lot of fun lately with some boo-boos. Ouch. Good thing I'm such a smart guy. Save often and use version numbers. Since I've started this project, I have 12 working MAX files, 6 working 3DS files, and 5 working UVW files. That may be a little too paranoid, but it works.

Before I get into all that, there is something that I would like to clarify. I am uvw mapping on a seperate model. When I get chunks of it done, I save the uvw to file, go back to a non-flattened model, then load the uvw file onto it. There. I feel much better now.

On with my boo-boos.

It all started with a few mishappening Material IDs. The Mat IDs are how I've been dividing up the model. You know, this colour for this and that colour for that. Turns out I missed a few faces. :yech:

On the left is the back of his head and underneath. Those two blue faces making an 'M' shape are supposed to be with the faces above it. I had to break them out, move them in, weld, and change their ID.

Then I noticed funny things going on under his chin and ear area - this is on the right. See that blue face surrounded by pink and "pointing" at the blue? Well, it's not suppossed to be blue. That little bugger and his mirrored friend were causing all sorts of problems. Max was getting confused and taking me right along.

Little did I know that that was just the beginning. Ran into more problems directly under his chin. Ugh!

Let's just say that it hasn't been fun. Switching between files and moving things around and all that. Welcome to the dark side. Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Double Ugh!

Left off with speeding up the uvw process. Only two quick things to show.

Here is one of his shoulder pads. His shoulder pads aren't conducive with any mapping because it curves under a tad bit all the way around. So I had to find a way to squish the top faces and bring the bottom ones out while minimizing distortion all the way around.

Lucky for us, Max will allow a modifer on seperate elements. Kudos!

There you have it. Applied some Taper to it and planar mapped it. Taper did a fine job of squishing the top and bringing out the bottom. See the gizmo? I could have used some soft selection on verts, but that's too much hit-or-miss.

Hands and feet!

There's a look at how I blasted the hands and feet for mapping. Some parts were mapped cylinder and some were mapping planar. Can you guess which were which?

Now, I don't expect the boots to be a major attraction, so I mirrored the maps and I also shrunk the bottoms. With mirroring, there is only one boot wireframe, but it works on both boots. All you have to do is map them both, flip one set of uvw verts, then weld them on top of each other. No big deal.

I did get a little lost in the hands. There are some small faces between his fingers. Nothing too terrible, though.

I also did his head. It was mainly a cylinder map with some hand tweaking. But I'm not going to show this. (Actually, when exporting the wire for the head, I noticed something funny and that led to the discovery of another boo-boo.)

UVW mapping is all done. Wireframes are saved out.

Up next:
Boning and Rigging!
This is yet another artform on this journey, but I'm going to cheat a little bit. You'll have to wait to find out. Can you stand the suspense?