[WIP] [weapon] Type 89

[anantdeathhawk]

Try this.
http://waylon-art.com/uvw_tutorial/uvwtut_01.html

[Hans_Strudel]

Try this.
http://waylon-art.com/uvw_tutorial/uvwtut_01.html

You are my savior! Thank you a lot! Maybe this tutorial is quite old, but methods are still useful, and now i have an idea how to finish UV without starting over again (anything but 58th try :26_suicid ).

[anantdeathhawk]

Keep trying my friend, i also struggle with UVW mapping.

[Spush]

For UV mapping, I'd suggest to do your smoothing groups first, create your smoothing groups where there is a hard edge, and you can unwrap based on smoothing groups. It helps speed things up, also make sure your uv islands are as straight as possible. Although not as important as you're not baking this from a high res mesh, but it will make texturing it easier when trying to do some scratches, etc.

Take a gander at this tutorial.

[Hans_Strudel]

I finnaly start making some progress with UV map.
This is what i have at that moment:


This is how it looks on model:










Stock's bottom side looks weird but i am not sure should i fix it or not:

[Mr.VdHeide]

That is a pretty good unwrap. Now you just need to optimize the layout of the individual UV Chunks so that you will get the best possible texture quality. Right now your UV map has a lot of unused space. Scale all the chunks up a bit and start rearranging them so you will use the available space better. It is an annoying job now, but it will make your model look much better later on.

Other then that you should consider giving the aperture sight more space on the UV map. Since you will be looking at that thing a lot and it is right in a players face. Similarly consider giving less vissible parts of your rifle less space.



D.J.

[Mineral]

Yeah also don't forget symmetric parts can be overlayed . Saves you a lot of space.

[Hans_Strudel]

So i tried to rescale and optimize UV map:



And i still have no idea how it will look in future.

@Mineral, thank you for your advice about overlaying the symmetrical parts. I combined parts that will have the same texture (stock and lower reciever halfs have difference, so i kept them separated).

[Mr.VdHeide]

Much better!

Could you maybe use a custom uv checker texture. Right now the tiles are pretty big making it harder to find texture stretching. Smaller checker tiles will show texture stretching better. Just download one. (You can also scale all the uv chunks up temporally)

You could start texturing the rifle at this point, but it would be better to check for issues before putting a lot of effort into a texture. Because even though you could always fix your uv map later when you run into trouble while texturing it is much better to do it now.




D.J.

[Hans_Strudel]

Whoah, over a year pause...

Anyway i am still working with model, despite army gatherings and university graduation. And this is the list of what changed after a year:
1) Some good people gave me an advice to rework model for high- and lowpoly versions so i was learning about high poly modeling. And here is the result



2) As i decided to make highpoly model i also reworking lowpoly version, so right now i have over 3k triangles advantage over previous one:




And right now i have a question:
if i will apply normal map on lowpoly model, will smoothing groups affect on normals?

[Hokunin]

Just try it and see for yourself in render window. But I think they probably will. Apply proper smoothing groups to surfaces, its easy.

[Hans_Strudel]

UV map for new model:


What is the texture resolution limitations for assault rifles in PR and should i plan the space for rifle attachments like scope?

[Hokunin]

Great UVW, you tried to utilize as much space as possible which is good. But some small elements seems to be placed too close to each other? Their textures might start bleeding onto each other.

For references on texture sizes you could look up yourself into the PR game directory. Use bf2meshviewer to view all the weapon models and photoshop to look up the .dds textures looks and sizes(with nvidia tools plugin installed for photoshop in order to view and generate .dds texture file formats).

As an example, AK-74M has 2048x1024 pixels size


Optics have separate texture maps with 1024x1024 for 1p view and 512x512 pixels for 3rd person view.

[Rabbit]

Couldnt he go bigger if he went dxt 1 and moved the alpha to the bump maps?

[Hokunin]

he could probably, Mineral and Rhino would confirm things for certain.

[Outlawz7]

Couldnt he go bigger if he went dxt 1 and moved the alpha to the bump maps?

That only 'works' if the bump map+alpha texture is smaller than diffuse, otherwise it's the same memory load.

[Mineral]

Just make 2k/4k Textures and let the dev who puts the weapon ingame worry about final resolution. Your source texture files should be as large as they can be.

Most important is to pick a square or rectangular aspect ratio. This depends on the uv. Lots of rifles go for rectangular due to the length. I'd choose similar here. So go 2x4k or 4x8k or something for your source textures.

We can always scale down. Not up.

[Hans_Strudel]

Thank you all for advices. Here is update:

1) i have updated UV map to fit for rectangular textures:



2) Smoothing groups added (previously it was 1 for whole model and it was a source of some serious distortion);

3) i also did some attempts for baking normal map (resolution 4x2k):









There are some areas i would like to rework, so this is not the final result. And i have a question - should i make an AO map? i was making it for another model for PR but not sure what it does to model.

[Hokunin]

Looking great!

"Ambient Occlusion" shading? You could apply those onto diffuse map.

The game needs only 3 maps:
- diffuse
- specular
- normal

[Hans_Strudel]

So i gathered all pieces together, fixed up all things on UV map i didn't like and made 2 version of AO map, but not sure which one is better:
1)


2)


But... after gathering all pieces i have met the problem - from possible player's view i can see inner side of handle:

Should i fix it or this is decent? I was thinking about adding 2 black planes on bottom and forward sides.