Palm skin

[Zacker]

I just finished my first prop skin ever for a SoW2 model made by Doffer:

[kleinluka]

Wasteful. Why did you create the same leaf texture 4 times??? Make it once and then have the other leaves in the mesh use the same part of the UV. When you do that I'd also suggest tiling the bark texture horizontally instead of vertically ... This way you can save tons of space in the texture....

The current image size is 800x800. Make sure you use powers of 2. a 512 for a palm tree should be enough.

[D3ads]

Haha, gotta love that clone brush

[Zacker]

I did not create the uvw-map, just the skin, so I have not had anything to do with having the leaf texture 4 times. Better use of the same texture is a thing I am trying to get our modellers to pay more attention to when making the uvwmap though.

Regarding the size, the actual skin is of course powers of 2, what did you expect:D The acctual size is 1024^2, I just scaled the preview image down to prevent it from fucking up the tables on the forum. And yes 512^2 could be "enough", but that is not enough for us:)

[kleinluka]

Well as texture artist you should create your own Unwrap so you can create it to suit your exact needs. A modeler shouldn't have to do this... I used to have modelers do my UVs too but that was because I was too lazy to learn uvw mapping...now that I do it everyday I can do whatever I want and don't have to rely and wait on the modeler to do changes to my Unwrap anymore.

It's really not that hard.

And yes 512^2 could be "enough", but that is not enough for us:)

Well, essentially that is what you are using RIGHT NOW. If you deleted all the duplicated parts and rotated the other pieces so they are right underneath you would probably end up with a 512 and NO or VERY LITTLE loss of detail. Right now you are using a 1024x1024 but you don't benefit from it at all because 80% of it is wasted space. It's like you made it high-res for the sake of....making it high-res.

[Zacker]

Interesting, at SoW it is almost only the modellers who do the unwrapping. I kinda expected that to be natural as unwrapping is done in a modelling program which our skinners don't dare to touch. Thanks for the advice, I will have a talk with skinners about if they maybe should check it out.

Personally I think unwrapping look like tough and boring task. As a level designer I don't like the concept of not just being able to smack on my textures:)

Hmm yeah it seems like I did not get your point regarding the "512 is enough" as you are right, there are a lot of wasted space which is plain useless.

[kleinluka]

Interesting, at SoW it is almost only the modellers who do the unwrapping. I kinda expected that to be natural as unwrapping is done in a modelling program which our skinners don't dare to touch. Thanks for the advice, I will have a talk with skinners about if they maybe should check it out.

It can be boring yeah. But its part of the job. And in most if not all professional environments it is the texture artist who does the unwrapping job. After all, he's the one who is going to have to texture the object. So he should decide which parts should take up how much space in the UV, or which parts he wants to stitch together for better blending etc... Yeah you work in a modeling program, but that's how it works. Talk to your artists It will help them in the long run.

[Zacker]

Thanks, I sure will:)

[Meotwister]

I'll back up kleinluka on this, it seems hard and a little intimidating maybe to learn uv unwrapping but it's definately not. You could probably learn all the things you needed to in a day.

And I agree on the wasted use of the uv map as well. FIX THAT!

[Defrag]

I think the problem with learning to UV is that there's about a zillion different ways to achieve something. It can be intimidating

Finding a good DVD (or internet vid) can be a good help though. Or just figure it out yourself.

[kleinluka]

like with anything it's just a matter of practice and actually sitting down and doing it.... its the only way you will get fluent with the different ways of approaching certain situations and solving them.