Pyrometheous wrote:I did it!!!!! Wooohoooo!
Confession: Didn't work on this as much as I'd hoped over the holiday, but I just now finished my UV mapp (totally had to reduce poly count) I'm very excited, what do you guys think?
Now I'm going to work on texturing, I've downloaded and installed Gimp, I believe this little ASP-7 will be very simple to do, but any advice or recommendations would be great! As always thank you all for your support. I hope I didn't disappoint you in my long delay. I'm hoping to make more and more progress every week going forward, but I suppose we'll see. I'm going to try and build the Tech Level 1 Command Center after I get the ASP-7 textured, and after I have those two units I'll be working on importing them into Spring.
I'm so very excited about this. UV mapping was the biggest pain ever. I have sooo learned my lesson as far as poly count goes, I had far too much detail (I kept finding surprise faces on my model that were not doing anything useful at all.)
the fun part comes in when you realize all the distortion in your uv map and the fact that you probably could shave off roughly 40% of your polies. Try and learn to pack your uvs tighter.
take a moment to study this texture if you can
(click image for larger)
you will notice how different pieces have been setup despite all angles to be cleanly pack into all space. I leave around 4-5 pixels space between each item due to "bleed" which happens at different mip levels.
You will also note that all optional equipment is on this uv. Do not make the mistake of leaving your equipment out as you will have to do many redundant textures. This is both an efficiency thing as far as textures in memory and a major time saver. Also mirroring saves massive amounts of space.