AuthorTopic: VIPER  (Read 8647 times)

Offline PAT BUTCHER

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VIPER

on: July 10, 2009, 02:53:14 am
so here's a low spec viper from battle star galactica, tell me what you think. 67 tris and 64*64 tex



uv's (awful layout) started off alot more organised, how important is this?



and texture



thanks  :lol:

Offline Jakten

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Re: VIPER

Reply #1 on: July 11, 2009, 01:21:47 am
texture organization is pretty important when you start looking to save space for restrictions and such. I acctually like how the ship looks with such a small texture although i think it could be managed better. Judging from the Top image your UVs are very messy, which is making some things look wonky and there are huge areas that aren't being covered by UVs. The texture seems uneven and you can mirror some of your UVs so both sides are the same. That should save you some space on your texture and you could probably add some more detail to some parts.

Hopefully this helps. It looks good so far, is this your first model?

 

Offline Squiggly_P

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Re: VIPER

Reply #2 on: July 11, 2009, 03:44:08 am
When using Blender for small UV layouts, there are a few tricks you can do to save space and get the pixels looking nice and square / uniform:

1) If you use a mirror modifier for the model, you can unwrap the model before you apply the modifier.  This will let you unwrap only half the model and mirror the texture to the other half.  The downside to this is that any text from one side will be reversed on the other side.  You can get around this by applying the mirror and then editing the UV layout for the faces you want to edit.  Very useful technique if you want to make a character with an asymetrical face or some other asymetrical aspects, but with other areas mirrored on both sides.  Another downside to this might be the fact that mirroring this way requires that there be a seam running down the middle of your model, which can add to the geometry.  If you have a very square model, it might seem a waste of polygons.  There are some methods to avoid the extra geometry, but they would require more texture space and a bit of extra unwrapping to get rid of the seam.

2) There is an option called "Snap to Pixels" that will snap the verts to the corners of the pixels, allowing you to get perfectly square areas to have perfectly square textures.  Snapping takes some practice, tho, as you can easilly end up with warping if the shape of the face in the UV editor is too far off from it's shape on the 3D view.  For really low-res models, these little warps can draw a lot of attention to themselves.  I'd recomend snapping to pixels to do the layout, getting the basic layout down and then turning that feature off and making adjustments to minimize any warping going on.  Snapping is incredibly useful on some models.  Especially models that are very boxy or that are extremely low-poly.  Try to keep the UV islands as simple as possible, with few polys per island.  Makes it easier to prevent warping and easier to conserve and re-use texture space.

3) When I unwrap a very low-poly model like this, I tend to pin (p key) all the verts after I unwrap it, and then if you need to edit the seams at all, unpin the areas you need to alter in the layout and unwrap it again.  You'll have to scale them down to fit (Blender will unwrap anything to make use of the full UV space, ignoring any bits of the layout that were unchanged), but you'll be able to alter parts of the layout that way without losing all your work in the other areas of the layout.  Especially useful if you have those areas textured already and don't want to have to waste time re-texturing those parts, or re-fitting the islands to them.  Especially useful if you are trying to add some asymetrical details to sections of the model while other sections are mirrored.

Offline PAT BUTCHER

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Re: VIPER

Reply #3 on: July 11, 2009, 01:23:24 pm
Hey thanks  ;D

Jakten, yeah its my first low spec model. I did think of mirroring  like you said, gonna try that in the next iteration.

I need to sort the uv's out and i think i can probably keep this level of detail with mirrored uv's on top of each other at 32*32 so i'll post that if i manage it.

Squiggly_P, Thanks alot for all the blender know how! I tried not to mirror the mesh because it seemed like a waste of geometry on something so small but I'm goin try out this pinning malarky and snap to pixel. Do you know anything about the game engine?

Here is the original uv layout, it was more orgainsed but to get the look i wanted i just moved things around to get light/dark in right places and it looked good so i left it, now time to organise!



I'll post when I've sorted out the uv's, Thanks

Offline Squiggly_P

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Re: VIPER

Reply #4 on: July 12, 2009, 06:13:54 am
It's funny you ask.  I have been at the cusp of finally getting off my ass and learning the game engine lately.  I still dunno if I'll work on that yet, but I do know that there are some very helpful people on IRC.

#gameblender on Freenode.

Several weeks ago I actually started learning it, and set up a blog.  I tend to do better at learning things by showing people how to do the stuff I just learned how to do (even if no one else is around to teach...).  I have one post on there right now, but it's literally no more than just some extremely basic info on the game engine that it pretty much just common sense.  I had started on the second one, but right now the files for it are rotting in a folder.  Had some other crap come up.  Might jump back on it tho.  There aren't a lot of beginner-level GE tutorials and information.

I just have so much crap that I'm working on, and none of it really seems to get anywhere :P

Your initial layout was a lot better.  Texturing and Unwrapping is something that you really just have to learn with practice and by looking at others' work.  There are a lot of .obj files floating around out there.  You should DL some or check out some game models in obj format and take a look at how they did their layouts.  I think Valve has some tool that will let you look at their source-engine stuff?  Or maybe you can import them into one of the SDK tools somehow.  I've not used that stuff in ages.  Anyway, you'll learn a lot that way.

Offline PAT BUTCHER

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Re: VIPER

Reply #5 on: July 14, 2009, 04:39:34 pm
Ok, thanks for all the help people  :D

Heres a newer version, this time with 61 tris, texture 24x29 (edit: 24x26 ) and in 32 colours. I cant think of anything more i can really do with this now, any ideas?





edit:



and Squiggly_P, can you link to you're blog please? I'd laike to take a look and maybe i can ask you a few game engine questions over there  ;D

Thanks!
« Last Edit: July 15, 2009, 12:21:39 am by PAT BUTCHER »

Offline ptoing

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Re: VIPER

Reply #6 on: July 17, 2009, 10:52:16 pm
Ideally you should stick to texture dimensions which are a power of 2. 32, 64, 128 and so on. Many engines do not like non power of 2 textures (and the PS1 for examble not either)
stuff like 32x64 is fine on some. Not sure about the PS1 tho, but I think it could do that.
So I would suggest to up your texture to 32x32.

Good improvement from what you started with.
For posting the textures it would be nice if you posted the actual texture image, not a jpg grab of the UV window where some stuff is selected ;)
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Jad

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Re: VIPER

Reply #7 on: August 08, 2009, 05:44:32 pm
Ahuh! Also about the texture, some actual pixel work to define certain things, make certain colours pop and get some good contrast in there would probably be nice!
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