Below I detail the full texturing process and pre-setup needed to do this to a professional, portfolio level of standard. Because I go into such detail most other textured meshes in my level will be shown in a separate post —here— as they’ll be going through the same process. The only variation to this will be if I use any alternative techniques or software to texture my assets.
The jeep was the most complex item I had in terms of considerations to model, and as such is the one I chose to go through in detail:
Texturing Preparation
Below I make use of the isolate select option to make things easier to see.
I opted to have a large exterior sewn together to avoid seams on the beveled corner as these could severely impact the look of the model.
To be efficient with my UV space, I decided to stitch together the underside area, shown below, as it made the most sense for my shells. I had to move them in slightly to avoid overlapping the UV’s; as you can see, the actual model has 2 areas covering the axle and I didn’t want these being part of that shell so to avoid stitching those areas I just stitched the top and bottom, and essentially scaled the sides in. The shell looks like it’s fully stitched, but it isn’t.
The grill was quite challenging as UVing beveled shapes, such as this, can be a nightmare. For a while, I was unable to improve the UV’s beyond the image shown:
To get a better unwrap result I cut off the faces running the entirety of the mesh (I didn’t actually notice at first these were part of the initial unwrap). From here I applied some extra unwrapping techniques, and I eventually got an almost distortion-free unwrap, which shouldn’t be noticeable in the final model:
The tires were a challenge, and a part of my model I had already considered may need revisiting at a later date to change the way I worked the treads in. Since the rest of my jeep is low poly it seems to be a case of two birds, one stone by not only lowering the poly count even further but also smoothing off a standard set of tires and then baking in the tire tread via the use of normals.
For now, though I decided to work with what I had. Basically, I cut out the tread sections and unwrapped the entirety of the rim. This was done on both sides, but the ones on the inside will be less visible/potentially invisible, and as such have been scaled down elsewhere:
Following on, I kept progressing and keeping my texel density in line with the other mesh areas:
Here are the small mechanical objects situated towards the rear of my jeep which essentially support the piping that flows around the top of the jeep. Again, using sensible UV’s, I hide my seams accordingly and stitch the inside together (remembering a pipe will be going through this hole so one seam on the inside will never be noticed):
Organisation
I began to organise my UVs based on sections of the car and what I would be deemed important. To the right are objects I would be scaling down considerably; whilst the central area holds my most important parts which would need the majority of the 0-1 UV space.
An example of areas I’ve hid by scaling them down in the texture editor. These are things such as the inside of the wheels, the underside of the jeep, axle and areas you can’t really see at all such as the pipe supports as mentioned above:
Texturing Preparation – Baking
After my initial bake, I saw results as shown below. Concerned, I had to research on various forums and experiment myself to see what was causing this.
Whilst being familiar with the idea of colours bleeding due to things like UV spacing I decided to revisit my UV’s and be more generous with the spacing.
One key issue I had allowing objects to have more resolution and thus warrant additional spacing was that my exterior that I previously decided to have as one large piece forced a loss of space due to the shapes of my other shells.
To combat this, I decided to take a step back and carefully look at my jeep. What I quickly realised was that the tire at the back effectively covers the back middle area of the body, completely. This was an excellent place to hide a seam and allow the vertical height of my main shell to be halved.
The results were fantastic, as you can see below, more space is used and more efficiently:
Whilst this was great I still had no idea if my issue would persist so I attempted something completely new. What I noticed, when baking, was that your target and source meshes can be precisely that – more than one. As this was something never taught and never needed prior I thought it’d be a great opportunity to give this idea a try.
Below you can see I separated all my mesh areas whilst keeping things like both lights together (parts that couldn’t possibly bleed into one another based on UV space/world space). I then grouped them in the outliner which just made organisation and selection so easy to do whilst keeping everything separated.
As you can see it forms a more reliable envelope this way and allows fine tuning of individual envelope areas if you want that extra precision. In my instance, though I wasn’t baking a normal map at this stage so I just ran with 0.1 search values and baked my diffuse:
The texturing stages and results can be found here.
Wayne Marsden - Unit 70 