[OSP][Item] Swords, axes and then some [Part II]
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Mackie
Sergeant at Arms
Hm? I thought lightwave was pretty much the standard modeling program to have and its only major competitor is 3dsmaxAustro said:
Ill admit that lw isnt necessarily the program best suited for doing low-poly modeling and such but rather bigger, more complex things....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightwave
I use JASC PSP 9... after psp was bought by corel it went to ****.
Specialist
Master Knight
I'm gonna ask this very seriously...
How do you get the renders to look so dang good? In-game they don't look nearly as detailed, due to them not having normals or speculars.
How do you get the renders to look so dang good? In-game they don't look nearly as detailed, due to them not having normals or speculars.
Mackie
Sergeant at Arms
+ 535 poly Mongo-konda executioners sword.
I would probably have done something more in the past few months if it werent for a number of real life issues and me still attempting to learn texturing which after some 12 years of trying seems to be just something i should simply consider an impossibility and leave it at that.
just f*cking pisses me off.
so many cool things i'd want to make and would be perfectly able to model wise but im stuck in the goddamn single plane.
even long round shaft shaped things are out of the question because of the horrid stretching they would cause.
only positive bit about that is that you wont see me trying to pass a gigantic penis as a weapon model anytime soon.
anywho heres that sword i mentioned
I would probably have done something more in the past few months if it werent for a number of real life issues and me still attempting to learn texturing which after some 12 years of trying seems to be just something i should simply consider an impossibility and leave it at that.
just f*cking pisses me off.
so many cool things i'd want to make and would be perfectly able to model wise but im stuck in the goddamn single plane.
even long round shaft shaped things are out of the question because of the horrid stretching they would cause.
only positive bit about that is that you wont see me trying to pass a gigantic penis as a weapon model anytime soon.
anywho heres that sword i mentioned
If unwrapping (not painting) is really holding you back, use Wings to help yourself out.
It's interactive unwrapping is fairly powerful and it's a good tool to use alongside a projection-mapping system like Lightwave's. It can unwrap things like sword back edges and the like and correct issues with certain types of projections. It only takes a day or two to learn it, it's very easy to get into.
That said, it's not a cure-all and often we just have to fake stuff when we're painting it.
From there the challenge is painting; I know you're finding that frustrating but I'm not quite sure how to help you get past whatever plateau you've hit. What can I do to help? There are a lot of good articles on theory and you already know a lot about art theory in general; I need to know what kind of specific tricks of the trade remain mysterious to really help.
It's interactive unwrapping is fairly powerful and it's a good tool to use alongside a projection-mapping system like Lightwave's. It can unwrap things like sword back edges and the like and correct issues with certain types of projections. It only takes a day or two to learn it, it's very easy to get into.
That said, it's not a cure-all and often we just have to fake stuff when we're painting it.
From there the challenge is painting; I know you're finding that frustrating but I'm not quite sure how to help you get past whatever plateau you've hit. What can I do to help? There are a lot of good articles on theory and you already know a lot about art theory in general; I need to know what kind of specific tricks of the trade remain mysterious to really help.
Mackie
Sergeant at Arms
xenoargh said:
if fantasy were reality.... well, you know how i tried to do things in the beginning? use small texture bits for different parts of models, giving each texture a different name/group and so. so a tool that i'd love to have the most is one that would have the smarts to collect all those separate bits and export them onto a single texture file
but then again i wish i had the ability to strangle people through internets and that would pigs fly (you have to admit that would be kinda cool. think seagulls are a problem? try flying pigs raining **** on your parade) and so on.
whenever I try getting into wings3d, uvmappro etc it all seems so INCREDIBLY complicated that i get quite literally nauseous.
im starting to think my noggin is just incompatible with the kind of logic the process of unwrapping/wrapping requires.
oh and that katana of yours that i promised, I pretty much forgot it until now
I have that somewhere on my laptop,im gonna try to upload it as soon as i get the laptop back from the shop.
OK, well I can help with that. Here's the workflow I use; it's a little funky but when you get used to it, it's very reliable and fast. This should take you maybe an hour to walk yourself through, but it's pretty much the whole enchilada.
Whew! That took forever to type, lol. Let's just say that, if you try this out and get through it, you'll find that you can unwrap almost anything very, very fast; that axe literally took less than 5 minutes to unwrap using this process. It won't be that fast for you at first, but practice makes perfect. Anyhow, hope this gets you past that roadblock man, it's the one of the major things holding you back, and I know that it's a major drag when you're stuck on something like that.
Here's a summary of the workflow:
1. Name your sub-objects properly, then export as OBJ without any uvs.
2. Perform initial mapping steps in Wings, including unwrapping / unfolding complex surfaces that can't be mapped well with planar methods; correct inefficient / problematic mapping issues in Wings.
3. Export to UVMapper Pro, where you can swiftly lay out your uvmaps and (if the object needs it) work on the efficiency of the resulting uvs.
4. Use UVMapper Pro and a Photoshop Action Script to do previews of your object; this isn't as good as realtime workflow in fancy programs but UVMapper Pro is a heck of a lot cheaper.
Install the ActionScript before starting this tutorial, and if you want to follow it really closely, open up your "spiked axe" model in Lightwave.
One non-minor technical note: the OBJ you export from Lightwave needs to be sans UV mapping of any kind; Wings doesn't handle it appropriately otherwise. I don't know what you have to do in Lightwave to make sure that is the case, but there are ways to do it in the OBJ file itself if you can't figure it out (it's a text file, if you're stuck on that, ask).
1. Label each sub-part of your model in your modeling application. If you're not sure how to do that, consult Google or your user's manual; all professional tools like Lightwave let people give their geometry a name. What's important here is that each has a name that will both break up the object when we get into Wings3D but will follow the object to UVMapper Pro, where it becomes a really useful way of handling the object's parts.
I used the following four names, which if you're following along, I strongly suggest using as well:
handle
blade
back spike
top spike
Then export the entire model as OBJ. Depending on your application, you may or may not have to specify whether to export as one object or several; if so, you need to do it as several. If you have the option to export either as a mesh or as bezier curves, select mesh. Don't export material definitions and use Windows-style end-of-line, if that is an option.
2. Open Wings3D and import the OBJ you've just exported. If you are in body selection mode, you will note that if you pass your mouse over each named section, it highlights in green, indicating that Wings knows that you've broken it up. In this case, I've left-clicked and have selected the "handle" sub-object I labeled in the step above.
Now right-click to open Wings3D's context menu. If you are in body selection mode, you will see an option at the very bottom of the menu called ".UV Mapping". Left-click on that to enter the interactive unwrapping mode.
Now it's time to unwrap the object. Each object requires a different strategy; I can't give you a strategy that will always work. That said, for round things like handles, the best possible strategy in the vast majority of cases is a mirrored unwrap with splits along the front and back. To see that in action, look at the UVs for the Grom axe in the Mackie Pack.
However, in this case the geometry wasn't modeled for that approach, so we have to use the second-best approach, a simple unroll of the cylinder. I say second-best here with a lot of reservations; this will only tend to produce a reasonable unwrap if the geometry of the handle is mainly straight, like this one is. But in this case it will work and we'll just have to hide a seam when we paint it, not a biggie.
So I use the edge selection mode and select an edge that runs perpendicular to the general orientation of the geometry, then right-click to bring up the context menu, then click "mark edges for cut".
This all sounds way, way more complicated than it really is! The only time something that is simple and straight like this handle can be a pain is if it expands or contracts a lot; then Wings may not do a good job "unrolling" it. Fixing those kinds of problems has no perfect solution, hence why I strongly recommend modeling very consciously with a centerline that provides a natural split and allows the geometry to be unfolded in a different way that usually results in less distortion. Again, see Grom's handle; that was a very tricky exercise in getting a clean unwrap but Wings made it fairly painless because I was modeling with the issues of projection in mind. If you look at the work of any of our other experts around here you'll see that same pattern, even if their approaches to specific problems differ somewhat.
Now that we've handled the one (and only) edge we need to manually select and cut, we need to set up the handle's ends. This is very easy.
Using face selection mode, left-click to select / un-select all of the end cap faces. When both ends are highlighted, right-click and set them to Auvchart 1. They can both be set to the same chart group, because they don't have any adjoining faces; Wings will automatically cut the seams between them and the handle.
This process is very simple, but I should say that it's not always perfect. Wings gets some very strange ideas about what faces should be connected and split from one another, with geometry made outside Wings. Even stuff made in Wings sometimes gets split in strange ways. There is no way around that problem; for cases where Wings simply screws things up, the best fix that I know of is to use a planar map later on in UVMapper Pro.
Now it's time to auto-unfold this object. Right-click again to bring up the uvmapping context menu, click "Continue" and then click on "Unfolding".
Hurrah! Wings has unfolded each part, and the results are pretty good.
However, they aren't perfect; Wings tries really, really hard to be efficient about its use of space, but often at the cost of common sense. One of my biggest gripes with Wings is that it very frequently aligns objects on the uvmap in ways that make a texture fill not work very well without a lot of screwing around, like this handle, which is not aligned even roughly straight up and down.
Luckily this is very easy to fix. Simply select any edge that is perpendicular with the object's direction in space and then we can align it. In this case, it's a snap; the handle's side edges are lined up nicely with the overall vector in space. However, this won't work in a lot of cases unless you've used the mirrored-halves approach that I mentioned earlier. How an object is modeled has a very direct impact on the speed of your workflow; in this case it can save a lot of time and effort getting the uvs aligned along an arbitrary X or Y axis for easier application of a texture fill, in this case a wood tile.
It doesn't always work out, of course; sometimes there is simply no way to use a tile fill as the basis of a skin and you'll have to hand-paint and do careful color-matching along seams, etc. But usually it can be done and fixing stuff like this now can save you a lot of work later.
More details; I've selected the edge, now I've clicked on "align", and I'm about to click on "Chart to Y", which is Wings rather-obtuse way of saying that that edge will be aligned straight up and down.
Now it's aligned; note how it actually made this part of the chart slightly more efficient in terms of total uvmap space used. Wings makes some strange choices about things like this; you just need to be aware that not everything will come out like you expect, and be prepared to deal with the occasional disaster. I've manually moved the two end-caps a bit apart here, as well; this will help later in the workflow. Wings likes to make everything right next to each other; this is actually bad practice for anything used in realtime because of mipmap bleed, so at the very least you want a couple of pixels of gap. The fastest way to do that with a complex collection of charts is to simply scale it down slightly, since Wings scales every chart from its center, instead of universally.
Now we're looking at the only other sub-object we need to unwrap in Wings. Why is the axe head the only other thing we need to do here? Simply put, the other objects can look pretty good, if not mathematically perfect, with a planar projection; doing a planar projection in UVMapper Pro is fast and easy so if it doesn't make a big difference in quality then time saved is a good thing.
But this axe blade, like most things, simply cannot be planar mapped, if you want it to look good. The back edges will look really, really bad here, because it's a 90-degree angle and it will cause obvious distortion and look horrible. So we can't cheat and save any time here. Instead, I've taken each of the edges and I've used face-selection mode to break them into charts; this took less time to do than to type this out, it's really intuitive once you realize you can "paint" it in. Then I auto-unwrapped it, giving me this result, which looks pretty reasonable, except for one major thing: the axe-head is taking up twice as much space as it needs to.
There are times when you have something like this and you can't get away with mirroring it, like when it has to have writing on it that end-users need to be able to read. Most of the time you don't have that problem, so you want to save as much space as possible so that you have as much room as possible on uvmap.
What I've done here is that I've used chart selection mode, clicked on one of the two axe sides, and I flipped it horizontally. Then I selected both of them and then moved it and the other one to the center by right-clicking on the context menu and selecting Move To--> Center. Voila, they're both matched up nicely.
It isn't always this easy; usually you need to use the Align-->Chart To X / Y technique to get them to line up with one another. But that's just one quick step; it's very easy once you understand how to use Align.
And that is it for using Wings. Export the project as OBJ.
Open up the resulting OBJ in UVMapper Pro.
You should see something like this, if you've been trying to follow this yourself; the axe head and the handle are unwrapped... but where the heck are the two spikes, and how do we fix that the axe head and the handle are on top of each other?!?
Relax; this is what UVMapper Pro is extremely good at handling.
Basically, from here on out, we're going to be using the sub-objects that we named all the way back at the beginning. These are referred to by UVMapper Pro as "groups".
Select the group called "back spike" as shown.
Now we're going to apply a planar map to "back spike" in one step. Go to the top menu and click Map-->Planar. Then use the settings here; this should be pretty familiar to you from Lightwave.
OK, now you'll have this little wee dot in the dead center of your UV layout. Don't panic, that's the spike, mapped; it just needs to be enlarged.
To enlarge it, hold down the "+" key on your numpad, and it will gradually enlarge. Use the arrow keys to move it around. Once it's big enough, you can also left-click and drag it, but take care to grab it near the center, or it will think you want to scale it, which will distort the map.
For faster scaling and movement, see the UVMapper Pro keyboard shortcut guide; this is a piece of software where it mainly follows PhotoShop conventions for selections and such, but things that are specific to 3D all have hotkeys, and knowing the basics is really helpful.
Now do the same thing with the "top spike".
Now it's time to fix that blade. Using the same process to select a Group, select the "blade" group. Move it off the chart; all the way off. This gets it out of the way and it's no longer over our other objects. Like Photoshop, you can hold down the space bar to switch from another tool to the Hand tool, allowing you to click and drag to move the view around.
It's time to use the manual selection tool and grab some specific geometry. Click on the Rectangular Marquee Tool (shortcut key: M) on the menu bar. It's just like the rectangle selection tool in Photoshop, only it can use different context modes depending on whether we wish to select by facet, vert or UV. By default, it selects by facet, so leave that alone.
Left-click and drag to select the blade sides but not the edges.
If you accidentally forget to grab something, you can click the shift key to add more to the selection or the alt key to subtract things you want to remove, just like PhotoShop. However, be 100% sure you've gotten everything you need before moving anything, and nothing else; this is one of the areas where using this tool can be a bit tricky at first.
Once you've selected the blade sides, move them up onto the uvmap, with no parts over the borders.
Now repeat with the blade top and bottom edges, fitting them onto the uvmap so that they fit neatly and do not overlap anything else. I also enlarged the caps for the handle a bit and moved them elsewhere here, but that's not technically necessary.
To test and make sure that there aren't any distortions you can't live with at this point, since the object is pretty much done, load up the checker texture. The results, if you've followed this step-by-step, should be roughly like what you see here.
Congratulations! You've finished unwrapping it and arranging it!
This brings up a menu like this. For now just follow the settings here.
Now for the process of skinning it. We need to start by exporting the uvmap. Click on File-->Save Template.
Save the resulting BMP, and open it up in Photoshop.
Now we're going to set it all up for painting in the easiest and most efficient way possible. First use the Magic Wand tool, Tolerance 0, Continguous = checked, to select the white outside all of the geometry. With things that have holes inside, you need to do it inside the holes as well here.
Before moving on to the next step, Invert your selection, so that you've just selected your uvs, nothing else.
Expand your selection by 2 pixels. Technically, 1 pixel is usually enough for "mipmap bleed", but not always; 2 pixels is usually enough at 512X512 resolution.
Make a new layer, via Cut. Voila, now everything is nicely masked and you can set transparency to locked, which avoids a lot of screwups, and select a part that you want to concentrate on very easily.
At this point, I fill the background layer with a non-black but dark color, usually a neutral gray. Important thing is not to use black or a bright color here; unless you have a serious problem with mipmap bleed, this will never be seen but it won't cause problems when being converted to DDS. Avoid using pure black if possible; when building DDS DXT1 with the nVidia filter, it can sometimes cause weird alpha issues.
Now do a texture dump of base textures to do your basic tests for color and feel. Run that Action Script, and you should see the results in UVMapper Pro; it basically uses anything put into Windows' image clipboard, so keep in mind that it may do strange things as you're working on the image. But the Action Script will send it a copy of the image for you to inspect your current progress. With a bit of practice, this is almost as good as realtime feedback and not only is it cheaper, you don't have to leave Photoshop. I understand that CS4+ now has something like this built-in, but I have no idea whether it sucks or not; this method works and is, in my opinion at least, a faster workflow than working with either Mudbox or Deep Paint.
Last stage: we're all done changing the OBJ and we're happy with the uvmap. Export it from UVMapper Pro, using the following settings. This gets rid of the Groups and it's then treated as a unitary OBJ by OpenBRF when it's time to do final setup there.
1. Name your sub-objects properly, then export as OBJ without any uvs.
2. Perform initial mapping steps in Wings, including unwrapping / unfolding complex surfaces that can't be mapped well with planar methods; correct inefficient / problematic mapping issues in Wings.
3. Export to UVMapper Pro, where you can swiftly lay out your uvmaps and (if the object needs it) work on the efficiency of the resulting uvs.
4. Use UVMapper Pro and a Photoshop Action Script to do previews of your object; this isn't as good as realtime workflow in fancy programs but UVMapper Pro is a heck of a lot cheaper.
Install the ActionScript before starting this tutorial, and if you want to follow it really closely, open up your "spiked axe" model in Lightwave.
One non-minor technical note: the OBJ you export from Lightwave needs to be sans UV mapping of any kind; Wings doesn't handle it appropriately otherwise. I don't know what you have to do in Lightwave to make sure that is the case, but there are ways to do it in the OBJ file itself if you can't figure it out (it's a text file, if you're stuck on that, ask).
1. Label each sub-part of your model in your modeling application. If you're not sure how to do that, consult Google or your user's manual; all professional tools like Lightwave let people give their geometry a name. What's important here is that each has a name that will both break up the object when we get into Wings3D but will follow the object to UVMapper Pro, where it becomes a really useful way of handling the object's parts.
I used the following four names, which if you're following along, I strongly suggest using as well:
handle
blade
back spike
top spike
Then export the entire model as OBJ. Depending on your application, you may or may not have to specify whether to export as one object or several; if so, you need to do it as several. If you have the option to export either as a mesh or as bezier curves, select mesh. Don't export material definitions and use Windows-style end-of-line, if that is an option.
2. Open Wings3D and import the OBJ you've just exported. If you are in body selection mode, you will note that if you pass your mouse over each named section, it highlights in green, indicating that Wings knows that you've broken it up. In this case, I've left-clicked and have selected the "handle" sub-object I labeled in the step above.
Now right-click to open Wings3D's context menu. If you are in body selection mode, you will see an option at the very bottom of the menu called ".UV Mapping". Left-click on that to enter the interactive unwrapping mode.
Now it's time to unwrap the object. Each object requires a different strategy; I can't give you a strategy that will always work. That said, for round things like handles, the best possible strategy in the vast majority of cases is a mirrored unwrap with splits along the front and back. To see that in action, look at the UVs for the Grom axe in the Mackie Pack.
However, in this case the geometry wasn't modeled for that approach, so we have to use the second-best approach, a simple unroll of the cylinder. I say second-best here with a lot of reservations; this will only tend to produce a reasonable unwrap if the geometry of the handle is mainly straight, like this one is. But in this case it will work and we'll just have to hide a seam when we paint it, not a biggie.
So I use the edge selection mode and select an edge that runs perpendicular to the general orientation of the geometry, then right-click to bring up the context menu, then click "mark edges for cut".
This all sounds way, way more complicated than it really is! The only time something that is simple and straight like this handle can be a pain is if it expands or contracts a lot; then Wings may not do a good job "unrolling" it. Fixing those kinds of problems has no perfect solution, hence why I strongly recommend modeling very consciously with a centerline that provides a natural split and allows the geometry to be unfolded in a different way that usually results in less distortion. Again, see Grom's handle; that was a very tricky exercise in getting a clean unwrap but Wings made it fairly painless because I was modeling with the issues of projection in mind. If you look at the work of any of our other experts around here you'll see that same pattern, even if their approaches to specific problems differ somewhat.
Now that we've handled the one (and only) edge we need to manually select and cut, we need to set up the handle's ends. This is very easy.
Using face selection mode, left-click to select / un-select all of the end cap faces. When both ends are highlighted, right-click and set them to Auvchart 1. They can both be set to the same chart group, because they don't have any adjoining faces; Wings will automatically cut the seams between them and the handle.
This process is very simple, but I should say that it's not always perfect. Wings gets some very strange ideas about what faces should be connected and split from one another, with geometry made outside Wings. Even stuff made in Wings sometimes gets split in strange ways. There is no way around that problem; for cases where Wings simply screws things up, the best fix that I know of is to use a planar map later on in UVMapper Pro.
Now it's time to auto-unfold this object. Right-click again to bring up the uvmapping context menu, click "Continue" and then click on "Unfolding".
Hurrah! Wings has unfolded each part, and the results are pretty good.
However, they aren't perfect; Wings tries really, really hard to be efficient about its use of space, but often at the cost of common sense. One of my biggest gripes with Wings is that it very frequently aligns objects on the uvmap in ways that make a texture fill not work very well without a lot of screwing around, like this handle, which is not aligned even roughly straight up and down.
Luckily this is very easy to fix. Simply select any edge that is perpendicular with the object's direction in space and then we can align it. In this case, it's a snap; the handle's side edges are lined up nicely with the overall vector in space. However, this won't work in a lot of cases unless you've used the mirrored-halves approach that I mentioned earlier. How an object is modeled has a very direct impact on the speed of your workflow; in this case it can save a lot of time and effort getting the uvs aligned along an arbitrary X or Y axis for easier application of a texture fill, in this case a wood tile.
It doesn't always work out, of course; sometimes there is simply no way to use a tile fill as the basis of a skin and you'll have to hand-paint and do careful color-matching along seams, etc. But usually it can be done and fixing stuff like this now can save you a lot of work later.
More details; I've selected the edge, now I've clicked on "align", and I'm about to click on "Chart to Y", which is Wings rather-obtuse way of saying that that edge will be aligned straight up and down.
Now it's aligned; note how it actually made this part of the chart slightly more efficient in terms of total uvmap space used. Wings makes some strange choices about things like this; you just need to be aware that not everything will come out like you expect, and be prepared to deal with the occasional disaster. I've manually moved the two end-caps a bit apart here, as well; this will help later in the workflow. Wings likes to make everything right next to each other; this is actually bad practice for anything used in realtime because of mipmap bleed, so at the very least you want a couple of pixels of gap. The fastest way to do that with a complex collection of charts is to simply scale it down slightly, since Wings scales every chart from its center, instead of universally.
Now we're looking at the only other sub-object we need to unwrap in Wings. Why is the axe head the only other thing we need to do here? Simply put, the other objects can look pretty good, if not mathematically perfect, with a planar projection; doing a planar projection in UVMapper Pro is fast and easy so if it doesn't make a big difference in quality then time saved is a good thing.
But this axe blade, like most things, simply cannot be planar mapped, if you want it to look good. The back edges will look really, really bad here, because it's a 90-degree angle and it will cause obvious distortion and look horrible. So we can't cheat and save any time here. Instead, I've taken each of the edges and I've used face-selection mode to break them into charts; this took less time to do than to type this out, it's really intuitive once you realize you can "paint" it in. Then I auto-unwrapped it, giving me this result, which looks pretty reasonable, except for one major thing: the axe-head is taking up twice as much space as it needs to.
There are times when you have something like this and you can't get away with mirroring it, like when it has to have writing on it that end-users need to be able to read. Most of the time you don't have that problem, so you want to save as much space as possible so that you have as much room as possible on uvmap.
What I've done here is that I've used chart selection mode, clicked on one of the two axe sides, and I flipped it horizontally. Then I selected both of them and then moved it and the other one to the center by right-clicking on the context menu and selecting Move To--> Center. Voila, they're both matched up nicely.
It isn't always this easy; usually you need to use the Align-->Chart To X / Y technique to get them to line up with one another. But that's just one quick step; it's very easy once you understand how to use Align.
And that is it for using Wings. Export the project as OBJ.
Open up the resulting OBJ in UVMapper Pro.
You should see something like this, if you've been trying to follow this yourself; the axe head and the handle are unwrapped... but where the heck are the two spikes, and how do we fix that the axe head and the handle are on top of each other?!?
Relax; this is what UVMapper Pro is extremely good at handling.
Basically, from here on out, we're going to be using the sub-objects that we named all the way back at the beginning. These are referred to by UVMapper Pro as "groups".
Select the group called "back spike" as shown.
Now we're going to apply a planar map to "back spike" in one step. Go to the top menu and click Map-->Planar. Then use the settings here; this should be pretty familiar to you from Lightwave.
OK, now you'll have this little wee dot in the dead center of your UV layout. Don't panic, that's the spike, mapped; it just needs to be enlarged.
To enlarge it, hold down the "+" key on your numpad, and it will gradually enlarge. Use the arrow keys to move it around. Once it's big enough, you can also left-click and drag it, but take care to grab it near the center, or it will think you want to scale it, which will distort the map.
For faster scaling and movement, see the UVMapper Pro keyboard shortcut guide; this is a piece of software where it mainly follows PhotoShop conventions for selections and such, but things that are specific to 3D all have hotkeys, and knowing the basics is really helpful.
Now do the same thing with the "top spike".
Now it's time to fix that blade. Using the same process to select a Group, select the "blade" group. Move it off the chart; all the way off. This gets it out of the way and it's no longer over our other objects. Like Photoshop, you can hold down the space bar to switch from another tool to the Hand tool, allowing you to click and drag to move the view around.
It's time to use the manual selection tool and grab some specific geometry. Click on the Rectangular Marquee Tool (shortcut key: M) on the menu bar. It's just like the rectangle selection tool in Photoshop, only it can use different context modes depending on whether we wish to select by facet, vert or UV. By default, it selects by facet, so leave that alone.
Left-click and drag to select the blade sides but not the edges.
If you accidentally forget to grab something, you can click the shift key to add more to the selection or the alt key to subtract things you want to remove, just like PhotoShop. However, be 100% sure you've gotten everything you need before moving anything, and nothing else; this is one of the areas where using this tool can be a bit tricky at first.
Once you've selected the blade sides, move them up onto the uvmap, with no parts over the borders.
Now repeat with the blade top and bottom edges, fitting them onto the uvmap so that they fit neatly and do not overlap anything else. I also enlarged the caps for the handle a bit and moved them elsewhere here, but that's not technically necessary.
To test and make sure that there aren't any distortions you can't live with at this point, since the object is pretty much done, load up the checker texture. The results, if you've followed this step-by-step, should be roughly like what you see here.
Congratulations! You've finished unwrapping it and arranging it!
This brings up a menu like this. For now just follow the settings here.
Now for the process of skinning it. We need to start by exporting the uvmap. Click on File-->Save Template.
Save the resulting BMP, and open it up in Photoshop.
Now we're going to set it all up for painting in the easiest and most efficient way possible. First use the Magic Wand tool, Tolerance 0, Continguous = checked, to select the white outside all of the geometry. With things that have holes inside, you need to do it inside the holes as well here.
Before moving on to the next step, Invert your selection, so that you've just selected your uvs, nothing else.
Expand your selection by 2 pixels. Technically, 1 pixel is usually enough for "mipmap bleed", but not always; 2 pixels is usually enough at 512X512 resolution.
Make a new layer, via Cut. Voila, now everything is nicely masked and you can set transparency to locked, which avoids a lot of screwups, and select a part that you want to concentrate on very easily.
At this point, I fill the background layer with a non-black but dark color, usually a neutral gray. Important thing is not to use black or a bright color here; unless you have a serious problem with mipmap bleed, this will never be seen but it won't cause problems when being converted to DDS. Avoid using pure black if possible; when building DDS DXT1 with the nVidia filter, it can sometimes cause weird alpha issues.
Now do a texture dump of base textures to do your basic tests for color and feel. Run that Action Script, and you should see the results in UVMapper Pro; it basically uses anything put into Windows' image clipboard, so keep in mind that it may do strange things as you're working on the image. But the Action Script will send it a copy of the image for you to inspect your current progress. With a bit of practice, this is almost as good as realtime feedback and not only is it cheaper, you don't have to leave Photoshop. I understand that CS4+ now has something like this built-in, but I have no idea whether it sucks or not; this method works and is, in my opinion at least, a faster workflow than working with either Mudbox or Deep Paint.
Last stage: we're all done changing the OBJ and we're happy with the uvmap. Export it from UVMapper Pro, using the following settings. This gets rid of the Groups and it's then treated as a unitary OBJ by OpenBRF when it's time to do final setup there.
Whew! That took forever to type, lol. Let's just say that, if you try this out and get through it, you'll find that you can unwrap almost anything very, very fast; that axe literally took less than 5 minutes to unwrap using this process. It won't be that fast for you at first, but practice makes perfect. Anyhow, hope this gets you past that roadblock man, it's the one of the major things holding you back, and I know that it's a major drag when you're stuck on something like that.
Specialist
Master Knight
I may take the liberty of removing some polies on that maquahuitl. You have alot of polies (well, maybe 30 or so) that can be easily simulated through normalmaps.
Mackie
Sergeant at Arms
Thanks, i am going to try that with the next model i cant do through my usual underhanded meansxenoargh said:OK, well I can help with that. Here's the workflow I use; it's a little funky but when you get used to it, it's very reliable and fast. This should take you maybe an hour to walk yourself through, but it's pretty much the whole enchilada.
Here's a summary of the workflow:
1. Name your sub-objects properly, then export as OBJ without any uvs.
2. Perform initial mapping steps in Wings, including unwrapping / unfolding complex surfaces that can't be mapped well with planar methods; correct inefficient / problematic mapping issues in Wings.
3. Export to UVMapper Pro, where you can swiftly lay out your uvmaps and (if the object needs it) work on the efficiency of the resulting uvs.
4. Use UVMapper Pro and a Photoshop Action Script to do previews of your object; this isn't as good as realtime workflow in fancy programs but UVMapper Pro is a heck of a lot cheaper.
Install the ActionScript before starting this tutorial, and if you want to follow it really closely, open up your "spiked axe" model in Lightwave.
One non-minor technical note: the OBJ you export from Lightwave needs to be sans UV mapping of any kind; Wings doesn't handle it appropriately otherwise. I don't know what you have to do in Lightwave to make sure that is the case, but there are ways to do it in the OBJ file itself if you can't figure it out (it's a text file, if you're stuck on that, ask).
1. Label each sub-part of your model in your modeling application. If you're not sure how to do that, consult Google or your user's manual; all professional tools like Lightwave let people give their geometry a name. What's important here is that each has a name that will both break up the object when we get into Wings3D but will follow the object to UVMapper Pro, where it becomes a really useful way of handling the object's parts.
I used the following four names, which if you're following along, I strongly suggest using as well:
handle
blade
back spike
top spike
Then export the entire model as OBJ. Depending on your application, you may or may not have to specify whether to export as one object or several; if so, you need to do it as several. If you have the option to export either as a mesh or as bezier curves, select mesh. Don't export material definitions and use Windows-style end-of-line, if that is an option.
2. Open Wings3D and import the OBJ you've just exported. If you are in body selection mode, you will note that if you pass your mouse over each named section, it highlights in green, indicating that Wings knows that you've broken it up. In this case, I've left-clicked and have selected the "handle" sub-object I labeled in the step above.
Now right-click to open Wings3D's context menu. If you are in body selection mode, you will see an option at the very bottom of the menu called ".UV Mapping". Left-click on that to enter the interactive unwrapping mode.
Now it's time to unwrap the object. Each object requires a different strategy; I can't give you a strategy that will always work. That said, for round things like handles, the best possible strategy in the vast majority of cases is a mirrored unwrap with splits along the front and back. To see that in action, look at the UVs for the Grom axe in the Mackie Pack.
However, in this case the geometry wasn't modeled for that approach, so we have to use the second-best approach, a simple unroll of the cylinder. I say second-best here with a lot of reservations; this will only tend to produce a reasonable unwrap if the geometry of the handle is mainly straight, like this one is. But in this case it will work and we'll just have to hide a seam when we paint it, not a biggie.
So I use the edge selection mode and select an edge that runs perpendicular to the general orientation of the geometry, then right-click to bring up the context menu, then click "mark edges for cut".
This all sounds way, way more complicated than it really is! The only time something that is simple and straight like this handle can be a pain is if it expands or contracts a lot; then Wings may not do a good job "unrolling" it. Fixing those kinds of problems has no perfect solution, hence why I strongly recommend modeling very consciously with a centerline that provides a natural split and allows the geometry to be unfolded in a different way that usually results in less distortion. Again, see Grom's handle; that was a very tricky exercise in getting a clean unwrap but Wings made it fairly painless because I was modeling with the issues of projection in mind. If you look at the work of any of our other experts around here you'll see that same pattern, even if their approaches to specific problems differ somewhat.
Now that we've handled the one (and only) edge we need to manually select and cut, we need to set up the handle's ends. This is very easy.
Using face selection mode, left-click to select / un-select all of the end cap faces. When both ends are highlighted, right-click and set them to Auvchart 1. They can both be set to the same chart group, because they don't have any adjoining faces; Wings will automatically cut the seams between them and the handle.
This process is very simple, but I should say that it's not always perfect. Wings gets some very strange ideas about what faces should be connected and split from one another, with geometry made outside Wings. Even stuff made in Wings sometimes gets split in strange ways. There is no way around that problem; for cases where Wings simply screws things up, the best fix that I know of is to use a planar map later on in UVMapper Pro.
Now it's time to auto-unfold this object. Right-click again to bring up the uvmapping context menu, click "Continue" and then click on "Unfolding".
Hurrah! Wings has unfolded each part, and the results are pretty good.
However, they aren't perfect; Wings tries really, really hard to be efficient about its use of space, but often at the cost of common sense. One of my biggest gripes with Wings is that it very frequently aligns objects on the uvmap in ways that make a texture fill not work very well without a lot of screwing around, like this handle, which is not aligned even roughly straight up and down.
Luckily this is very easy to fix. Simply select any edge that is perpendicular with the object's direction in space and then we can align it. In this case, it's a snap; the handle's side edges are lined up nicely with the overall vector in space. However, this won't work in a lot of cases unless you've used the mirrored-halves approach that I mentioned earlier. How an object is modeled has a very direct impact on the speed of your workflow; in this case it can save a lot of time and effort getting the uvs aligned along an arbitrary X or Y axis for easier application of a texture fill, in this case a wood tile.
It doesn't always work out, of course; sometimes there is simply no way to use a tile fill as the basis of a skin and you'll have to hand-paint and do careful color-matching along seams, etc. But usually it can be done and fixing stuff like this now can save you a lot of work later.
More details; I've selected the edge, now I've clicked on "align", and I'm about to click on "Chart to Y", which is Wings rather-obtuse way of saying that that edge will be aligned straight up and down.
Now it's aligned; note how it actually made this part of the chart slightly more efficient in terms of total uvmap space used. Wings makes some strange choices about things like this; you just need to be aware that not everything will come out like you expect, and be prepared to deal with the occasional disaster. I've manually moved the two end-caps a bit apart here, as well; this will help later in the workflow. Wings likes to make everything right next to each other; this is actually bad practice for anything used in realtime because of mipmap bleed, so at the very least you want a couple of pixels of gap. The fastest way to do that with a complex collection of charts is to simply scale it down slightly, since Wings scales every chart from its center, instead of universally.
Now we're looking at the only other sub-object we need to unwrap in Wings. Why is the axe head the only other thing we need to do here? Simply put, the other objects can look pretty good, if not mathematically perfect, with a planar projection; doing a planar projection in UVMapper Pro is fast and easy so if it doesn't make a big difference in quality then time saved is a good thing.
But this axe blade, like most things, simply cannot be planar mapped, if you want it to look good. The back edges will look really, really bad here, because it's a 90-degree angle and it will cause obvious distortion and look horrible. So we can't cheat and save any time here. Instead, I've taken each of the edges and I've used face-selection mode to break them into charts; this took less time to do than to type this out, it's really intuitive once you realize you can "paint" it in. Then I auto-unwrapped it, giving me this result, which looks pretty reasonable, except for one major thing: the axe-head is taking up twice as much space as it needs to.
There are times when you have something like this and you can't get away with mirroring it, like when it has to have writing on it that end-users need to be able to read. Most of the time you don't have that problem, so you want to save as much space as possible so that you have as much room as possible on uvmap.
What I've done here is that I've used chart selection mode, clicked on one of the two axe sides, and I flipped it horizontally. Then I selected both of them and then moved it and the other one to the center by right-clicking on the context menu and selecting Move To--> Center. Voila, they're both matched up nicely.
It isn't always this easy; usually you need to use the Align-->Chart To X / Y technique to get them to line up with one another. But that's just one quick step; it's very easy once you understand how to use Align.
And that is it for using Wings. Export the project as OBJ.
Open up the resulting OBJ in UVMapper Pro.
You should see something like this, if you've been trying to follow this yourself; the axe head and the handle are unwrapped... but where the heck are the two spikes, and how do we fix that the axe head and the handle are on top of each other?!?
Relax; this is what UVMapper Pro is extremely good at handling.
Basically, from here on out, we're going to be using the sub-objects that we named all the way back at the beginning. These are referred to by UVMapper Pro as "groups".
Select the group called "back spike" as shown.
Now we're going to apply a planar map to "back spike" in one step. Go to the top menu and click Map-->Planar. Then use the settings here; this should be pretty familiar to you from Lightwave.
OK, now you'll have this little wee dot in the dead center of your UV layout. Don't panic, that's the spike, mapped; it just needs to be enlarged.
To enlarge it, hold down the "+" key on your numpad, and it will gradually enlarge. Use the arrow keys to move it around. Once it's big enough, you can also left-click and drag it, but take care to grab it near the center, or it will think you want to scale it, which will distort the map.
For faster scaling and movement, see the UVMapper Pro keyboard shortcut guide; this is a piece of software where it mainly follows PhotoShop conventions for selections and such, but things that are specific to 3D all have hotkeys, and knowing the basics is really helpful.
Now do the same thing with the "top spike".
Now it's time to fix that blade. Using the same process to select a Group, select the "blade" group. Move it off the chart; all the way off. This gets it out of the way and it's no longer over our other objects. Like Photoshop, you can hold down the space bar to switch from another tool to the Hand tool, allowing you to click and drag to move the view around.
It's time to use the manual selection tool and grab some specific geometry. Click on the Rectangular Marquee Tool (shortcut key: M) on the menu bar. It's just like the rectangle selection tool in Photoshop, only it can use different context modes depending on whether we wish to select by facet, vert or UV. By default, it selects by facet, so leave that alone.
Left-click and drag to select the blade sides but not the edges.
If you accidentally forget to grab something, you can click the shift key to add more to the selection or the alt key to subtract things you want to remove, just like PhotoShop. However, be 100% sure you've gotten everything you need before moving anything, and nothing else; this is one of the areas where using this tool can be a bit tricky at first.
Once you've selected the blade sides, move them up onto the uvmap, with no parts over the borders.
Now repeat with the blade top and bottom edges, fitting them onto the uvmap so that they fit neatly and do not overlap anything else. I also enlarged the caps for the handle a bit and moved them elsewhere here, but that's not technically necessary.
To test and make sure that there aren't any distortions you can't live with at this point, since the object is pretty much done, load up the checker texture. The results, if you've followed this step-by-step, should be roughly like what you see here.
Congratulations! You've finished unwrapping it and arranging it!
This brings up a menu like this. For now just follow the settings here.
Now for the process of skinning it. We need to start by exporting the uvmap. Click on File-->Save Template.
Save the resulting BMP, and open it up in Photoshop.
Now we're going to set it all up for painting in the easiest and most efficient way possible. First use the Magic Wand tool, Tolerance 0, Continguous = checked, to select the white outside all of the geometry. With things that have holes inside, you need to do it inside the holes as well here.
Before moving on to the next step, Invert your selection, so that you've just selected your uvs, nothing else.
Expand your selection by 2 pixels. Technically, 1 pixel is usually enough for "mipmap bleed", but not always; 2 pixels is usually enough at 512X512 resolution.
Make a new layer, via Cut. Voila, now everything is nicely masked and you can set transparency to locked, which avoids a lot of screwups, and select a part that you want to concentrate on very easily.
At this point, I fill the background layer with a non-black but dark color, usually a neutral gray. Important thing is not to use black or a bright color here; unless you have a serious problem with mipmap bleed, this will never be seen but it won't cause problems when being converted to DDS. Avoid using pure black if possible; when building DDS DXT1 with the nVidia filter, it can sometimes cause weird alpha issues.
Now do a texture dump of base textures to do your basic tests for color and feel. Run that Action Script, and you should see the results in UVMapper Pro; it basically uses anything put into Windows' image clipboard, so keep in mind that it may do strange things as you're working on the image. But the Action Script will send it a copy of the image for you to inspect your current progress. With a bit of practice, this is almost as good as realtime feedback and not only is it cheaper, you don't have to leave Photoshop. I understand that CS4+ now has something like this built-in, but I have no idea whether it sucks or not; this method works and is, in my opinion at least, a faster workflow than working with either Mudbox or Deep Paint.
Last stage: we're all done changing the OBJ and we're happy with the uvmap. Export it from UVMapper Pro, using the following settings. This gets rid of the Groups and it's then treated as a unitary OBJ by OpenBRF when it's time to do final setup there.
Whew! That took forever to type, lol. Let's just say that, if you try this out and get through it, you'll find that you can unwrap almost anything very, very fast; that axe literally took less than 5 minutes to unwrap using this process. It won't be that fast for you at first, but practice makes perfect. Anyhow, hope this gets you past that roadblock man, it's the one of the major things holding you back, and I know that it's a major drag when you're stuck on something like that.
...felt like iwas going to have a damn seizure reading half way through, though. but it did make some sense
Sure, go for it. I could have modeled it a bit differenetly / more "efficiently" but I took the concious choice to model in some of the details cause I thought they made big enough of a difference in the looks department.Specialist said:
anywho
khopesh
557 polies
im gonna make another one of these sometime soon, found two designs i liked equally as much.
Specialist
Master Knight
YES! I've needed one of those for an experiment for a long time, but have never been able to model one.
Mackie
Sergeant at Arms
Xeno I finally got the hang of unwrapping
I accidentally found out how its done in LW + Your methods.
The next few models im putting out will still be a combination of my usual style but im gradually adding more and more of "actual" texturing.
-But even so this is MAJOR step for me, cause like ive said, it allows me to do models I couldnt have been able to before cause im no longer stuck with one single plane.
to quote a couple of people on irc
I accidentally found out how its done in LW + Your methods.
The next few models im putting out will still be a combination of my usual style but im gradually adding more and more of "actual" texturing.
-But even so this is MAJOR step for me, cause like ive said, it allows me to do models I couldnt have been able to before cause im no longer stuck with one single plane.
to quote a couple of people on irc
Oh? Whazzat? Do entertain my curiosity :pSpecialist said:YES! I've needed one of those for an experiment for a long time, but have never been able to model one.
Awesome! Don't worry; you're a keen enough student of the rest of it that I'm sure you'll get the hang of the painting side pretty quickly; feel free to post stuff in the 3D thread to get specific pointers / critique, I don't mind giving guidance there on technique issues.
