hey ive been trying this uv thing out, and i have expereicne with higher poly uvs but these s3o uvs jsut arent looking so great. any tips? i mean first i was doing at 256 by 256 which turn out no that pretty, then i bumped it up to 512 but still my textuires look pixelated and ugly. any suggestions?(

(i use ps)

You need to be kinda sneaky and tricky with UV maps. lesson 1 is to share as much UV area as possible, the more faces share the same map the less texturing you have to do and the higher res your textures appear. Secondly, prioritize more featured texture space and give it higher UV area for higher UV resolution on your textures. Shoulder pads with logos on them should be as high res as possible for instance, Breastplates for most models, tank cannons. Third trick is to remove as much white space as possible. Make every part of your UV map useful, whitespace is taking up your texture ram and not being rendered by anything on screen, don't bother having it. If you do all that right your UV's should look alot better in no time.

its not really the uv map, its more of a texture thing that im having problems with.

heres an example of a texture i was working on.
http://www.fileuniverse.com/?p=showimage&ID=3605
ignore that face poly error its being fixed up

and the older one evn worse

http://www.fileuniverse.com/?p=showimage&ID=3606

waht mean to say they are plain, and the texture brushes i use dont seem to help, anny suggestions?

Map:
http://cs.selu.edu/~ssmith/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=970

Model:
http://cs.selu.edu/~ssmith/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=968

wow now thats pretty, makes mine look kinda like a pile of friggin puke

It just takes practice. Have patience.

yeah dude, if you are patient you will get better. I didn't start awesome hell, I am sure we all sucked in the begining.

We all start sucky. Yes...even me.

But look at me now!

UV mapping is probably the most pain in the ass part of modeling, there is no secret formula, you just have to keep working at it.

Forget making the UV nice, this texturing nonsense is twice as hard (for me at least)!
For reference, here's the UV for the model:


Here is what UpSpring gives me from a 512x512 texture, which is still a work in progress, mind you...

At least I got the team color to come out right, somewhat...

However, something is very wrong with the way UpSpring (and Spring too?) handles these textures... it seriously degrades the quality of a texture, as if it were using a texture half the resolution of what it is actually supposed to be. I confirmed my suspicion by loading the same model and texture (except I had to meld the team-color layer into the texture layer, whatever) into LithUnwrap, and here's what I got:


I can only think one thing now: What the heck is up with UpSpring?

A few things....

You have TONS of waisted space, use your space more efficiently.. empty texture space is VERY VERY BAD!

Upspring is not a preview of quality... it scales the texture down in the preview. Lithunwrap is also previewing at a higher resolution with shading. Seriously have you seen the white base?

USE SPRING to preview!

omg... noob!! lame!!!

soo ugly kill me make it stop please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

you hurt me, you really do
anyways, I e-mailed my stuff to you, so hopefully you'll be able to make more progress on it.

Its a nice unit, Fizz. Just the green color scheme is too...bright.

definitely too rich, the green was a placeholder more than anything else.

I must disagree about this, the texture I made also have some space between each part. Problem is Upspring (yeah, that bitch) somehow ALWAYS shift my UV bitmap several pixels (enough to ruins the entire camoed scheme). I know this coz I rebuild it from scratch tree times and result still the same. I resize it and crop it again a few pixel til it fixed
Afterwards I always have extra space and paint a bit outside the 'screen capteured' UV wire. Otherwise there will be disaster when I assembled the model...

Secondly, your whitebase is blocky design which is easy to UV with minimum 'between' space. While the walking vegetable he made is rounder design so it rather difficult to do so. Now try to finish UV ur Zaku and show me ur UV...so I can learn from it ^_^'

Thirdly, Sometimes Upspring destroy the entire UV order if U rescale them too much


Thx for info but Spring dont work anymore in my comp (after I change some broken hardware) All I can do is shadow modeling

btw did the lighting in Spring acurately imitated by Upspring 'lighting' function ? it is important coz my model looks very flat without lighting but once the lighting turned on it looks very OK. If lighting in SPring is that good I donot need to add preshading right ?

ehhh just wait for supcom

I remapped the flea for zenka, that is damn curvy...
early metal texture here



fist I am doing all the aircraft and then the mechs.

And if you didn't see it already:
http://cs.selu.edu/~ssmith/spring/screen010.jpg
If the jetcorebooster is not curvy enough well PFFT!


nope



It is an axiom of texturing to always texture your model in 70% light 30%
shaddow so it isn't flat looking.

gawd... i knew your were gonna brag again!

1. It is always advisable to have a small amount of space between objects on your uvmaps. Otherwise, you may end up with "wrap" problems where a pixel for one part gets wrapped over to an adjacent part, due to the fact that the per-pixel representations of your objects aren't completely accurate.

This is less of a big deal if, like Smoth, you do anime-style models with a lot've blacklining to suggest panel joins, etc., but it's more of a problem if you're trying for realism, and even Smoth keeps a minimum gap in his maps. In short, it's OK and normal to waste some space. And you're always going to have things that aren't squares, or cannot be presented as square without distortions, which means that you're going to end up with funky shapes. Go ahead and keep them accurate- since Spring doesn't support multitexturing on S3Os, we have little incentive to break things down to quads and tris, even though this is more efficient.

2. A lot of how well a skin comes out is based on what parts of the model you emphasize, by giving it a larger area of the uvmap and greater detail. Don't keep small objects that will hardly even be visible a lot've detail- that's pretty pointless, and while it'll look neato in screens, it doesn't matter in game. Instead, give most of the detail to the large areas of the model that require them- and shave off detail from large areas whenever practical. For example, if you have a model of a tank, give very little texture space to areas like the bottom of the hull, the bottom faces of the turret overhang, etc.- these parts are hardly ever visible anyhow, in Spring, and shouldn't have a large area of the texture assigned to them. This re-sizing of different parts to fit a specific need is the real art of making good uvmaps. Look at some of my pieces from NanoBlobs in UpSpring, where you can see the uvmaps and how they correspond to different areas, and I am sure you will learn a few things.