Making good UV textures?

#1 I don't know about tips for professional looking UVs but ...

Try and straighten the shapes up a bit so you've got less jaggies. Cut down the space between the islands and keep them a bit away from the edge, always expect the actual UV to bleed a few pixels outside of it's island.

From memory I vaguely remember -- possibly wrongly -- that you're using Blender???
en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/UV_Map_Basics
www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_8OV92HLPY

Also this one is win
www.blendercookie.com/2008/12/14/unwrapping-a-human-head

#2 Thanks, I changed it:


Any other advice?

EDIT: Those links are mostly how to create the actual UV. Do you have any tips for making the actual textures?

#3

Quote:
Those links are mostly how to create the actual UV. Do you have any tips for making the actual textures?

errr ... learn to MS Paint?

Feel free to replace MS paint with Gimp, photoshop or equivelant.

Also move those UV islands away from the edge and resize stuff, there's a lot of blank and thus wasted pixel space in your UV.

#4 Thanks for the UV advice, but I was hoping for something more then just "Learn it" when texturing.

I mean, there are normal mapping, specular, diffuse, and a bunch of other things that I have no idea how they make them. I looked online, but EVERY tutorial out there seems to be only useful for a specific image, and you would need to do something before-hand which they don't tell you.

#5
UVing is a bit like solving a puzzle. Overall, I hate puzzles but somehow I rather enjoy UVing.

One thing I find important is to keep seams down in number as far as possible. Seams tend to show up in models--especially with dynamic lighting. Try to put them in crevices or where they follow natural edges in the model. The best seam, though, is still the one that isn't there at all. Also remember that split vertices add to your vertex data stream as each vertex can have only a single UV (i.e. once you split the UVs for a single vertex, it effectively becomes two vertices).

While seams are bad for diffuse, that are doubly so for normal maps.

UV Relax is your friend. Make generous use. Lock vertices if you want to preserve boundaries.

While some recommend breaking proportion according to importance (i.e. give more UV space to regions that require more resolution) I generally hate painting on something where the brush takes on different resolutions when going over the mesh. When something needs different resolutions, I usually break it up into separate maps (e.g. head and torso).

#6
Addendum: My workflow for anything that I don't unwrap with projections is: Lay down seams. Unwrap. Find my seams are bad. Adjust seams. Unwrap. Find my seams are still bad. Iterate. End up with so-so UVs with too many islands. Start welding and relaxing all over the place. End up with nice UVs with few island.

#7 Feel Free to thank me later. It picks up right after UV layout (which you've done)

Also, cgtextures(dot)com. You need to sign up, but it's free and full of win. No royalties or anything.

#8 use photoshop and layer styles
ambient occlusion renders are huge timesavers
build a library of pattern overlays and all your stuff will be consistent

most important for me is learn phoptoshop layer styles. once you have a decent pattern overlay library you'll be able to texture pretty realistically in half an hour or so.

#9 What you have technicly works, though to be honest if you handed this off to a texture artist to work with I think you would have two black eyes and a broken nose :)

So why doesnt it work?

Well the big thing that you need to really keep in mind when doing this is that its a trade off between laying out the UVWs into something logical and readable, versus trying to utilize your space the best and sadly for the most part you didn't do both quite right. None of these clusters make any sense for what they are or where they go and there is a lot of room here that is going to waste where you could have scaled up all the UVW coordinates and packed them better with the layout that you do have.

Here is an older UVW layout that I did a few years ago, which I think should give you an example of what I mean...

Here are what I would call the golden rules:
- Talk to your texture artist & programmer to find out what they need and wants that works best. Its a team effort, not a goal for you to finish early and make the rest of the project down the line hell.
- Think about what you are making first before you do it. Preplanning will help out a lot.
- Maximize texture space. The more pixels you have available for your UVW data the more detailed your images will be.
- Whenever possible try to make your clusters as large as possible so that anyone working with the bitmap can logically tell what the data is. This will make it much easier for people to work with the data you provide and make friends, not enemies :) Remember that most texturing is done in 2D space with Photoshop (or similar app) so if the artist cannot tell what they are painting, you've failed utterly.
- Align clusters together based on their colors. ie) If half your data needs to be black and the other half white, literally align your dark uvw clusters on one side and the white ones on the other. This will help a lot with ensuring that the bitmaps display right when mip mapping takes effect.
- While generally speaking everything should be spacially to the same scale as it is in the XYZ space, you can make certain clusters larger or smaller based on their need for pixel data. Ie) The face on a character you might want to make larger so that its more detailed, since people will look at the face first; while the bottom or inside of a polygon you never really see can be shrunk since it takes up unnecessary space.

#10

Quote:Feel Free to thank me later. It picks up right after UV layout (which you've done)

Also, cgtextures(dot)com. You need to sign up, but it's free and full of win. No royalties or anything.

Yes! Thank you, that's what I've been looking for! I already use cgtextures, but thanks.

Quote:- Talk to your texture artist & programmer to find out what they need and wants that works best. Its a team effort, not a goal for you to finish early and make the rest of the project down the line hell.

I highly doubt my texture artist and programmer would mind (me)

Quote:- Think about what you are making first before you do it. Preplanning will help out a lot.

Shotgun!

Quote:- Maximize texture space. The more pixels you have available for your UVW data the more detailed your images will be.

Yea, I was just using that UV map as an example. I know how to make real UVs pretty well.

Quote:- Whenever possible try to make your clusters as large as possible so that anyone working with the bitmap can logically tell what the data is. This will make it much easier for people to work with the data you provide and make friends, not enemies :) Remember that most texturing is done in 2D space with Photoshop (or similar app) so if the artist cannot tell what they are painting, you've failed utterly.

Well I know that I will be able to read it, so that's all that matters to me right now.

Quote:- Align clusters together based on their colors. ie) If half your data needs to be black and the other half white, literally align your dark uvw clusters on one side and the white ones on the other. This will help a lot with ensuring that the bitmaps display right when mip mapping takes effect.

Already did that.

Quote:- While generally speaking everything should be spacially to the same scale as it is in the XYZ space, you can make certain clusters larger or smaller based on their need for pixel data. Ie) The face on a character you might want to make larger so that its more detailed, since people will look at the face first; while the bottom or inside of a polygon you never really see can be shrunk since it takes up unnecessary space.

What about making my UVs bigger to fill in more of that space?

#11 UVs for me are a pain in the blank.

I know Zbrush lets you paint directly onto a model and it makes a UV'ish texture automatically. Don't know how well it works when importing into Torque tho. I must investigate!