Plan for David "FenrirWolf" Grace

Having fun learning how to UV map.

I admit, I'm not much of a UV mapper. So far I've been just happy with procedural textures, plus very basic planar mapping. Maybe it's because I learned how to do 3D on older versions of Lightwave which didn't have all this fancy-pants UV stuff.

Anyway, to "fake" it I've just been using Surface Baker plus a simple atlas UV map in order to get my objects into Torque. Well, this doesn't look so good. Atlas maps aren't very efficent when it comes to space in the UV map, so if you go with the defaults sometimes things get smooshed. You need more space on the UV to devote to, say, an emblem than just some repeating texture on the clothing. This is why the villian of GRM looks so blurry.

Anyway, I got home and excitedly downloaded TSE with the intention to play with it -- Only to get suck in re-mapping the robot monster model. First I put it on a polygon diet. I managed to shave off over a thousand polygons, bringing the model below 3200 polys. Why so many? Because originally the object existed as a subdivision object and I just froze it at a fairly low subd level. This generated all kinds of redundant polys. Plus, I killed "dead weight" polys like the insides of the joints and such which will never be visible anyway.

Creating a UV texture map itself is art. But generating the UVs is pure divine intervention! I went and read about a half dozen tutorials on the net, but most just end up saying, "Uhh, break your model apart. I can't tell you exactly how to do this as it is not something that can be described. You'll eventually learn on your own." After about three false starts, I finally decided on a way to chop my model up into easy-to-map pieces. I'm not finished, but at least I've got the head mapped with a very basic texture.

When I load up the default orc player model that comes with Torque, I have to marvel at how efficient its UV map is. UV mapping is a lot tougher than I had initially thought!

Maybe tomorrow I can play with TSE...