[Weapon] M7 Grenade Launcher (+ M9A1 rifle grenade)

[lucky.BOY]

First we need to polish the Unwrapping, then we can go on to packing the UVs. Also you will be packing the launcher and the grenade into one single texture sheet.

And something about the Unwrapping looks funny. First I would do planar UV of the front face on the tip of the grenade, maybe even the entire hemisphere. Now its just streched and ugly. Furthermore, when you apply a checker texture (though something like this is better https://dl.dropbox.com/s/b8r708puuvrvoc4/dogYX.jpg ), you should see no stretching or disproportions on the texture, as long as you can help it. All the squares should be squares on the object. Create UV seams on each hard edge on your object.

I think I learned the ropes with this tut, there are probably tons of better one out there but this is what I learned from Creating a Weapon For Source - Part 2 tutorial - Mod DB

[KaB]

Just finished the M7 (without the locking thing) :



Few renders :

http://i.imgur.com/sggRuyE.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/9SXNKvx.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/2Pa3ezd.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/1Njmr7Q.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/FEMMPRs.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/hVCESC3.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/rAkRHzG.jpg

First we need to polish the Unwrapping, then we can go on to packing the UVs. Also you will be packing the launcher and the grenade into one single texture sheet.

What if I divide the whole thing in 4 parts, which will make four squares. Then I'll bring them all together and then it'll make only one square... I'm actually not really sure how I could do that tho

[lucky.BOY]

A lot of strehing seems to be going on in the UVW, just from looking at the UV layout. Bake turned out pretty good actually, though I can see some cage issues on the little detail on the front of the launcher.

About joining 4 squares together, that will be sub-optimal packing, as you will have much more limiting "boundaries" than you have with one big square. Also the UVs for each part probably wont end up in same scale, which is the idea with ALL UVs. I also fail to see what 4 parts (with similar amount of surface area) you would want to divide it into?

Fastest thing to do in a rather simple scene as this is to attach all lowpoly objects together, Unwrap and pack UVs, and then Detach them for the baking.

[KaB]

Fastest thing to do in a rather simple scene as this is to attach all lowpoly objects together, Unwrap and pack UVs, and then Detach them for the baking.

Uh, sounds pretty obvious. Thx for the heads up.

One more thing, I saw Psyrus set 4096 for the size, however he does not model for BF2, but that made me wonder : should I pick 4096 or stay at 2048 ?

[Psyrus]

Uh, sounds pretty obvious. Thx for the heads up.

One more thing, I saw Psyrus set 4096 for the size, however he does not model for BF2, but that made me wonder : should I pick 4096 or stay at 2048 ?

Render it at a high resolution and downsize it in photoshop, the end result is much better. My final resolution is 1024x1024, but if you render direct to 1024x1024, the result is much worse anti-aliased than downsizing in photoshop

[Spush]

When creating content, you usually work in the highest resolution, but you then downsize it. For something like this it should be downsized to 512x512 since it's a small object.

[Psyrus]

When creating content, you usually work in the highest resolution, but you then downsize it. For something like this it should be downsized to 512x512 since it's a small object.

It has the added benefit that if you keep the source files, when you want to port your M7 or whatever to PR2, you can just re-export it at a higher resolution if that's called for, rather than rebaking it again

[KaB]

I think I learned the ropes with this tut, there are probably tons of better one out there but this is what I learned from Creating a Weapon For Source - Part 2 tutorial - Mod DB

I deticked 'Normalize map' as it's said in the first video, so how comes the front of the nade goes gives me an oval on the UV, whereas it doesn't look anything like this in 3D :



The size is also pretty out of it : http://i.imgur.com/gJ5ObPT.jpg

[Psyrus]

I deticked 'Normalize map' as it's said in the first video, so how comes the front of the nade goes gives me an oval on the UV, whereas it doesn't look anything like this in 3D :

http://i.imgur.com/WQlHiPr.jpg

The size is also pretty out of it : http://i.imgur.com/gJ5ObPT.jpg

This is what you should be aiming for (roughly, threw it together in about 5 min)



I highly recommend checking out textools, it's compatible with 3dsmax 9 - The relax, iron, align tools are all really useful!

TexTools

Edit: Then you can start getting fancy with overlapping UVs to save space

[lucky.BOY]

Psyrus;2021027']Edit: Then you can start getting fancy with overlapping UVs to save space

I wouldnt recommend that as
a) Normal map could not work too well with that, but one can test bake and decide if its a issue
b) Not too good idea if you want any text on the grenade, like this:

[Psyrus]

I wouldnt recommend that as
a) Normal map could not work too well with that, but one can test bake and decide if its a issue
b) Not too good idea if you want any text on the grenade, like this:

Yeah it was just an example, obviously it would be mirrored so you wouldn't use it where you needed unique text, but on the lower parts or areas that could share normals it wouldn't be an issue.

[KaB]

So if I get it right, unless I planned to put a text on it, I can make the UVs getting any shape I want (but not too much distorted according to what lucky says). However, what if 2 linked UVs (linked on the 3D plan) have quite a different size ? Will it matter ?

Cause what I did is that once textool packed it for me, I randomly took any small UVs I could find and grew it in order to fill all the holes, without caring if it's gonna be much bigger than its neighbor. But then if it doesn't matter, where's the point of doing that ?

What problems can the big holes cause ? Or, what should they Really be used for ? Only to grow big UVs ? But then again if I can't really deform them there will still be a lot of unused space.

Textool packing doesn't make a perfect square though, so I understand I need to move small UVs in order to make it look like a square (so that I can grow the whole thing as much as I can). But after that I still really don't know why I should fill the holes.

[lucky.BOY]

Are you packing everything (Launcher + grenade) into one texture sheet?

As I said before, lets first Unwrap it, and then pack it.

[KaB]

Here's the unwrap :



Few views of the model with a textool's texture :

http://i.imgur.com/CUkedDT.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/myg0Aru.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/MMgcJ2K.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/8KYYqpS.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/2zZ4jno.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/0eVnQRA.jpg

[Psyrus]

That's a decent start, but there's a fair amount of wasted space. With some reorganization you could potential upscale everything by about 10-20% and get a better resolution on your textures

Here's a pretty bad example because I don't have too many small pieces, which makes it hard to fill in the gaps from the awkward shaped items. Your one has a bunch of rectangles which should be much easier to work with



Also on pics like this one, upscale the UVs to check the square sizes a bit better.
http://i.imgur.com/CUkedDT.jpg

[KaB]

Yea I didn't pack it properly yet.

Psyrus;2021821']Also on pics like this one, upscale the UVs to check the square sizes a bit better.
http://i.imgur.com/CUkedDT.jpg

Here you go :

http://i.imgur.com/2jZzkbz.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/I5JsoVr.jpg

[lucky.BOY]

Unwrap looking pretty solid, here are some things I noted



EDIT: Also, try and place your UV seams on the circular shapes so they are hidden from the most common POV. (for example here you will mostly be looking at the thing from about the same POV as the image above, so you want to hide as many seams as you can from this POV.

Another thing is that I dont think the placement of the seam on teh tip of the grenade is too fortunate, starting to think that maybe doing the whole tip with a cylindrical UV might be the best option, is the texture is done right the distortion on teh tip wont be noticable and you will have no seams there, plus you will save some UV space. So basically give it another try and try to do it like you did it before, yeah I know I said that was the bad way to do it

[KaB]

For the hard edges you mean I should break those two rectangles :



Should the three ones from the U stay together ?

For the planar, it'll look like this then, is it alright ? :



That's how it currently looks like : http://i.imgur.com/yQ6rau2.jpg

[lucky.BOY]

You need to move the central vertex of that cone a bit back, that way the cone will be shorter and the UVs wont be as distorted when you look at it from the side. But yes, the planar UV will still be better, mainly as it will save you a bunch of UV space.

Whereever you have a hard edge on the model (hard edge = border between two smoothing groups) You need to separate the UVs, too. Otherwise the normals will look bad there, as normal map on one side of the hard edge will have totally different color complared to the normal map on other side of the hard edge.

[KaB]

Whereever you have a hard edge on the model (hard edge = border between two smoothing groups) You need to separate the UVs, too. Otherwise the normals will look bad there, as normal map on one side of the hard edge will have totally different color complared to the normal map on other side of the hard edge.

Well ... I made tests few days ago for the normal map and it actually went differently : some hard edges got seams, and when I did put the normal map on the low poly model I got some unwanted tiny black lines on these same edges.
I can't be sure about the cause of these black lines (there weren't so much of them though), however this made me deleting seams on a lot of hard edges, like on these ones :

http://i.imgur.com/407zzdP.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/BJ7m9ii.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/bPefUvw.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/DhG2Asd.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zoRNL4e.jpg

I did this thinking this would fix the black line thing, but also save some work for the texturer, as all those connected faces have more or less the same texture IRL (obvious).

I could enlarge the smooth groups for these parts. But then it's going to look terrible (large smooth groups look definitely not good, but I suppose you know this already). Example : http://i.imgur.com/1fEQ5dM.jpg

What I mean is that the "seams on hard edges" rule sounds pretty weird to me.