How to atlas - Help wanted!

[Beherith]

1. Obtain the main texture you will be using for atlassing. In our case, it is the cremuss master texture:http://beherith.eat-peet.net/stuff/Arm_wings.png
2. Install Wings3d
3. Open the wings file that you will be texturing, in our case it is the arm hovers: http://imolarpg.dyndns.org/trac/balates ... vers.wings
In wings, do the following steps:
A. File/import image. Select the atlas texture.
B. Right-click in the geometry window, and select 'material...', name the new material 'cremtex'. Hit OK.
C. In the outliner window (if it is not visible, select it from window/outliner) right click on the Arm_wings.png image, and select 'pick up image'.
D. In outliner, right click on 'cremtex', select 'drop picked object' and 'diffuse'.
E. In body selection mode, (hotkey b), select all the non-redundant pieces of a unit, and then right click, select 'combine'. Delete the redundant stuff, its much easier to restore by mirroring and duplicating than texturing it all together.
F. Keep the unit selected, right click and hit '.UV mapping.'
G. Change to edge selection mode (hotkey e) and ctrl-a select all edges. Right click and hit 'mark edges for cut'.
H. Deselect all edges, (spacebar deselects all) and look at your model. Each face will be a separate piece on the UV map. If you see surfaces that shouldnt be split in two, select the edge between them, and right click and select 'unmark edges'.
I. When happy with the cutting, right click then 'continue' and 'unfolding'. You should now have the uv map.
J. close the UV editor window, and select all the faces of the unit. right click and select 'Material.' and select 'cremtex'.
K. Right click and hit 'UV mapping'. You should now have the atlas texture under the UV map.
L. I recommend you now select all the faces in uv editor, right click and select 'move to center'. This will overlap identical faces (most of the time).
From here on it is just general guidiance, and most is visible in my atlassing video.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ2_-AYeXuI&feature=plcp

I recommend learning and adding hotkeys. Especially moving and rotating and scaling. You can add hotkeys by selecting a menu item and hitting the insert key.

Edit:
Often times a face will have such a shape that it is not easy to map it where you want it. Its OK to split the face up and mirror its parts to achieve what you want.

[FireStorm_]

It's FUN ... at first. Now strangely enough it has become somewhat addictive. I keep wanna fix things I'm not happy with and then suddenly it starts to look like something.

Here are some Tips and Tricks I've found:

Cut and Mirror.
Obvious (in video) but still: Cut the model in half or very likely at least some parts of it. Mirror after texturing.

Flexible.
Once you have a texture to work with, you can easily add some un-uvmapped geometry. Just uv-map and add the material (which holds the texture) to the selected mesh. Click the material in the outliner and do 'assign to selection'. Delete the leftovers: uv/texture/material

3D.
Rather not use " .hole. " It saves tri-s to render, but it makes the surface transparent/disappear. That is excellent for stuff at the bottom of a unit that can't be seen from top-down, you say? Well I advise against it since in Spring the camera can turn and people use this making videos showing units from all sides. Texture nice all over .

Resolution.
I think it would be nice to keep the resolution of the texture on the model somewhat the same on all the surfaces. So not a super sharp detailed one next to one showing some blurry stuff. Don't prioritise this though or you'll go mad.

2D Shapes.
Don't try to match a shape selected in the uv-edit-window with a shape on the texture. Unless it is a rectangle it might not even be there. On creamusess texture there are 3 distinct tingle shapes (a light. a roster and a patch of teamcolour), but that doesn't mean a triangle should be mapped on one of those 3. Be creative with your shapes.

Colour and contrast.
Rather look at colour and the brightness of that colour and focus more on that at first. The overall composition is more important in the beginning. Maybe wonder where to make it dark, bright, chaotic, dull. Where to put lights, teamcolour, lights.

Flexible 2D Shapes.
In the uv-edit-window 'cut' and 'stitch' are your friend. Also one can scale a bunch of vertices to 0% to line stuff up neatly.

Oke, I'm back on atlassing now. Got one almost done.

[Beherith]

Extremely good points FireStorm!

I would also like add a few points:

Edge highlighting.
A lot of the visual style of cremusses stuff uses heavy highlighting of concave (worn) edges. Besides looking extremely good, it is also quite easy to follow.

Dont sweat the small stuff.
Its easy to get carried away in trying to add as much detail as possible to every face. Just keep the tiny things a solid color that matches their surroundings.

Shading.
A lot of faces are pre shaded to some degree, and you can also enhance the occludedness of a face by using the gradients on the textures.

Distortion - avoid if possible.
Dont map rectangular faces to nonrectangular areas, and vice versa.

[FireStorm_]

In the unlikely event someone wants to help texturing/atlassing, don't use the linked-to armhovers.wings file, for as of now it is no longer up-to-date. (I've started texturing the arm hovers today, and also some remodelling occurred.) Alternative file(not yet worked on by others)

[Silentwings]

We should put these instructions (in a non-BA(R) orientated form) into the wiki or the game creation section imo, it could be really useful to someone.

[enetheru]

um.. wut.. this describes uv unwrapping not atlassing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_atlas

[FireStorm_]

1. Obtain the main texture you will be using for atlassing. In our case, it is the cremuss master texture:http://beherith.eat-peet.net/stuff/Arm_wings.png

Looks like a Texture atlas to me, but I might be mistaken of course


Also:
I want to take this opportunity to say, the alternative file I linked to is also no longer up-to-date. If some-one wants to give Atlas-texturing for BAR a go, feel free to just ask here or pm or something...

[enetheru]

1. Obtain the main texture you will be using for atlassing. In our case, it is the cremuss master texture:http://beherith.eat-peet.net/stuff/Arm_wings.png

Looks like a Texture atlas to me, but I might be mistaken of course

well yes the linked texture does look like an atlas. but i looked at the video, and read the isntructions and its all describing uvunwrapping.

but then ive had a few drinks so i may be a little poor on logic tonight.. and tact.

[FireStorm_]

Ah oke... Cheers then.
If you'd watch the full 20min video, you'll notice it goes beyond UV-unwrapping, and continues to show Atlas-texturing in awesome action. Just so you know

[FireStorm_]

We should put these instructions (in a non-BA(R) orientated form) into the wiki or the game creation section imo, it could be really useful to someone.

I agree and would move to wikifi it if I weren't so busy with actually doing this stuff.
I might get around to it but probably not for a while...

Edit:
Also I'm wondering why it would need to be non BAR, also because It seems to mean one couldn't use the video behe made.

[Beherith]

the video is contains a link to a sample texture atlas, the gritty industrial one.

[Silentwings]

Also I'm wondering why it would need to be non BAR

I think the wiki is supposed to be game neutral; afaik there is nothing wrong with giving examples from e.g. BAR but once its on the wiki I think it would need a source of info instead of a 'please help with BAR' post.

Of course there is no hurry, I just wanted to put a note on so as once BAR is textured this post wasn't cast away and never seen again.

[Beherith]

Having to atlas symmetrical trapezoidal faces to rectangular atlas textures is something I have run into often, and here is a neat little solution to reduce distortion:

Split the longest parallel edge of the trapeze into 2 equal parts, and connect the resulting vertices to the vertices of the opposing paralell edge vertices.

[Cremuss]

'can't help but think you're all crazy using my old ugly textures as a gigantic atlas
Good job nonetheless, it's good to see my work being put to good use

[FireStorm_]

@Behe
I probably didn't do that often enough, although I did often triangulate distorted faces before mirroring to prevent having different distortions on each side of a symmetrical axis. In any case, nice tutorial-image

@Cremuss
I think the atlas makes for a chaotic image but I think the textures looks nice.
(So in my case you have it backwards; using it made me go crazy sometimes . )