Need UV-Mapping help ! 1 simple job for a skilled artist Thread

Hey there,

I would need some help with a small job, that would be particulary simply for someone with a little experience in UV Mapping. I still model in truespace, which works quite well for my purpose, but I always have problems creating good looking textures and UV-mapping round or spherical objects. If you want to help, please take a look into this thread here :

Hard-light.net

Disregard all the details on the model, including all intakes (like doors etc.) I only need the UV-Map for the main body. Any help would be highly appreciated. Please contact me here via PM.

Thanks in advance

Cheers
Starman

Make 3 different shells for spherical objects like that.
Two flat circles covering the "polar regions" and one long squareish shell covering the "equator part".
It's not that difficult really.

You should try out Roadkill (UV-unwrapping tool that comes with a really good stretch-shader). It's easy to use and learn.

Edited by: Nightshade

Well, my problem is more creating a good looking map, that covers the polars as well as the connection points. When i would do it the way you suggest, then I would manage to get rid of wrong stretching on the polar regions, but then I will get serious troubles making a smooth texture connection between polar and equator, also I would be forced to reduced my available texture space by 100%, because I need the room for the circle map for the polar. I was more hoping, that it would be possible to use one big tilling texture all over the sphere :-(

A few things worth noting or planning out:
Is the 512x512 texture area available for just the sphere body, or would this include the other elements as well (the legs, door, etc)?
What is the most common angle and distance this thing is going to be seen from?
What visual style are you aiming for?
What does the actual geometry/topology look like?

Depending on the answers and looking at some references of Union-class Dropships, they seem to have a lot of plates and segments that would help serve as pretty natural places to hide UV seams and avoid warping. Even without the resolution a seamless texture could bring, I think this could be used to achieve a decent amount of visual detail (perhaps even more so, as then the texture detail can be more unique)

Is the 512x512 texture area available for just the sphere body, or would this include the other elements as well (the legs, door, etc)?

Since this will be one of the larger game objects, I intend to give this object 2 texture maps. So one of the 512x512 map will be only for the main sphere, all detail is already in the other texture.

What is the most common angle and distance this thing is going to be seen from?

Mostly isometric view from above, so the upper polar region and the sides are more important then the bottom, but some (like me) like to zoom in very close, and then the object will be more visible from the size

What visual style are you aiming for?

Well, it should look mostly realistic and metallic. The texture should give the impression of it's real size (100 meter in diameter). I rather don't want to make huge visible armorplates on it, because it's so big. But I also think that a seamingless texture (I called that tillable :-) ) will be sufficient.

What does the actual geometry/topology look like?

I'm not really sure what you mean with that. Are you referring to the surrounding terrain ? The complete model geometry of the ship is the one seen in the thread, the untextured version. Most of the time, the model will be placed inside other starport structures, which will even raise the impression of the ships size.

IMO simply get rid of the red and blue boxes in the txtr and it will look fine. I seriously doubt anyone is going to nitpick the way you already have it UV mapped.

I don't know, I'm not really happy with it. Maybe if I would find a better base texture, but I can't draw new textures that look good, I'm limited to what I find in free texture resources, mostly here :

Cgtextures.com

I'm not really sure what you mean with that. Are you referring to the surrounding terrain ? The complete model geometry of the ship is the one seen in the thread, the untextured version. Most of the time, the model will be placed inside other starport structures, which will even raise the impression of the ships size.

I mean the wireframe/edges. They determine what is possible with the UV layout, making it usually wise to model with the UV/texture in mind.

I think this is also where the plated look would come in. It would give more places to hide seams and eliminate warping, and the detail it provides would look much more metallic and man-made than having a smooth seamless texture applied. Something like T3.gstatic.com or Camospecs.com

Yeah, I also thought about that. Take a look here, the geometry is not that hard, it based on trapezoid (not sure if this is a real english word ) faces mostly.

Omnitech.hard-light.net

Technically, I could map each face alone, or group of faces, but the problem is still that most that I do is based on square maps, and Truespace offers only a very rough spheroid UV-Space for editing, it will strech the texture bad more or less. I guess, if I could find a texture that fits, I could achive something useable, though my texture resources don't offer something I like.

Edited by: starman01