Design and Development #4
There is something calming about the process of creating the UV Map, placing the seams and watching the result unfold is a like puzzle that has infinite solutions.
Seams are the thin red lines you'll see scattered across the 3D model to tell the UV map where to tear apart.
Using seams (left) vs not (right)
This is why UV Mapping can be quite a tedious task. If you do not carefully plan how your UV Islands are mapped out then your texture will end up looking stretched and distorted (As you clearly see above with the placeholder texture). Its not something you'll want to be painting on.
Before unwrapping your model you want to make sure your model is ready, this is something I kind of forgot to do. When unwrapping the base of the ship it was becoming quite complex even with the use of seams. I decided to further lower the poly count of the model which will make UV mapping easier and make the model less resource intensive (because there is less data to load)
There much nicer and easier to work with!
This was mainly done by using "edge slide" a feature in blender that lets you slide along a row of vertices across its local axes, then "merge doubles" which merges together vertices that overlap.
The mirror modifier in blender comes not only with the benefits of mirroring your model across its center, it also comes in handy when you want to save space in your UV Map. This is possible because when using the mirror modifier it also unwraps the mirrored version aswell. The down side is less variety in your texture because if you paint one side you will also paint the other. (Unless you separate them afterwards)
After unwrapping each piece individually I can finally start to piece together all the UV Islands together on one UV Map!
Wow such mess. You can see all the UV Islands intersecting each other. This is the least fun part of the already un-fun part that is UV Mapping.
(The selected part of the model is highlighted orange, this is going to take awhile!)
Let me sort this out and clean this up :( Next time I post I can hopefully show you some texturing which should be much more exciting!