#uvunwrap

UV Skull / Glitch Black

Modeling #5

I believe I will finish the modeling phase by today as I only have a couple more assets I need to start working on my Unreal scene. I resume my modeling by attempting to model new assets, which include a futuristic ray gun, a portal, an ancient statue, a boat and a treasure scroll.

Although these models may seem too intensive and complex, all of those can be simply created using basic calculations in the choice of your 3D softwares. I will be using a mix of both Maya and Blender for it.

Figure 1 (Creating a boat)

I start creating a boat by using a simple sphere with a low number of segments. It's a bit unconventional as most would start using a sphere but I wanted to experiment if I could create the model using another method.

I remove the upper half faces of the sphere leaving the lower faces intact. I then use a simple modifier called 'Deform' which allows you to deform selected meshes. I change the default preset to a 'Stretch' and increase the factor to a .800 value which stretches out the sphere.

Figure 2 (Deleting upper half faces)

Figure 3 (Stretching the boat sphere)

I then solidify the boat with the solidify modifier and export it over to Maya as I find it more easier to unwrap the seams in Maya as opposed to Blender. I use a third party plugin to easily cut UV seams but you can also do it with the default UV engine inside Maya as it is really powerful.

Figure 4 (Unwrapping UV seams in Maya)

I start working on the treasure scroll for the scene. These are really easily to create as I use a capless cylinder and duplicate its smaller versions a couple more time. I add a subdivision edge loop in the middle and scale it down. It also helps if you bevel the middle loop as you get more control over how detailed you want it to be. However, as the name of the game here is optimization, I want to make it really low-poly and stylized.

Figure 5 (Creating the treasure scroll #1)

I also make it so that the scroll is not properly rounded but a bit jagged. It gives the essence of an old dried scroll paper. I also manipulated certain vertices so that the entire scroll doesn't appear much symmetrical.

Figure 6 (Creating the treasure scroll #2)

Now, I work on creating the futuristic ray gun. This gun will be very low poly, as I aim to texture it better in substance designer. This is a very common and a mandatory workflow used in almost all games where the game ready assets itself are very low poly but are textured well. As the process of creation is quite similar to other meshes, I will skip through how I created each assets.

The ray gun is similar to how I modeled some of the metal greeble parts for the Unreal scene. A lot of basic primitives reshaping, extruding and inseting.

Figure 7 (Manipulating simple cube primitive to create the handle)

Figure 8 (Marking UV seams)

I am also working on the UV maps of the assets while I am creating them. It does generally speed up the process than to create all the models and then one by one, start UV marking the seams.

Figure 9 (Creating a steampunk doll)

I also decide to model a steampunk doll made up of metal rods and a light bulb for its face. This was a very straightforward process of using capless cylinders and extruding faces and beveling when necessary.

Figure 10 (Creating a steampunk doll)

Day 63: Video about UV, UV unwrapping, and mapping - concepts and fundamentals

Sun UV Unwrap - Body

The above demonstrates good methods for unwrapping different shapes, and how to arrange your UV layout.

Tips:

when moving Vertices in the UV Editor, hold right click and choose UV instead, that way you won’t select two UV map sections at once

Remember to use the spin left/spin right tools instead of rotating with E

Use the Merge & Target Weld tools to reduce poly count

I’m trying to learn to create my own UV unwraps. This is deeply weird to me as I used to workout how other people did their unwrapping so I could paint over existing textures. Having hand unwrapped and projected each face of the dice previously my good friend @ReverendSpeed told me to put seams down in the UV menu on the left of the 3d window, so the texture could be automatically laid out.

This is not as intuitive as I think he thinks. I need to learn how to communicate what’s important to this system.I was expecting it to be a little less wasteful and a lot more straight lined as to how it projects things.

Eventually I gave up on a contiguous layout and just separated all the faces.

Which gave me the most efficient layout. I still had to work out roughly what angle the dice were sitting at so I could build a good texture in Photoshop.

This is my result. It does look lovely in Unity however. Even without Bump maps.

This brings me back to the tank. I marked seams. (That’s the red lines) Picked up and resized the bits. The underside of the tank turret wont really be seen so it’s tiny compared to the top. I noticed a tool set for painting in the uv window so I took a poke about...