UV unwrapping/atlassing Wings3D video tutorial

[Beherith]

I made a video of me unwrapping and atlassing Mr. Bob's Tremor.

The video is almost 20 minutes, but the actual work was around 45 minutes.

I use hotkeys for scaling, moving and rotating UV meshes.

I'm uploading it mainly to show how easy it is to work withe any model and an existing texture, and to show that anyone can easily achieve great results with an atlas and a little creativity.

The video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ2_-AYeXuI

The finished model ingame:

[KaiserJ]

nice, watching it now...

but why not max?

[Beherith]

Max looked too complicated for me the first time I tried it, I also knew I wasnt going to use most of its features. So wings is a nice and comfortable easy to learn program.

[KaiserJ]

ah cool; gotcha! enjoyed the vid, interesting to see others' workflows, thanks for the share

[MidKnight]

Very interesting! I learned a few things from watching that.

[Beherith]

Cool, then it was already worth posting it. I am interested in the workflow of others as well, if anyone wishes to share a model creation/texturing/uv unwrap process, I would be grateful.

[Petah]

Nice work!

[knorke]

interessting.
You move/rotate/scale just "by eye" do you?
I know you can hold ctrl or something to "snap" move/rotate, if the texture was lined up with such grid then matching up uvmap and texture would be easier. The finetuning to get the shapes perfectly congruent seems very time consuming.
After unwrapping I always get some pieces that are at odd angles. Those are annoying to rotate to make them parallel to other edges, especially if there are multiple copies of the same surface but rotated at other angles.

[Beherith]

Yeah, the best would be to just 'snap', but I dont know of any way to do that. But I have move bound to M, rotate to R, scale-x to S, scale-y to D and uniform scale to U.
Also, more than half the time the parts just cant be snapped, but have to manually be aligned. Not that much trouble to be honest.

Holding shift while rotating a piece will increment in 15 deg angles, which are usually congruent with what wings places them at.

[KaiserJ]

shall i do one then?

[Beherith]

It would be an honor!
Do you use wings or max, Kaiser?

[KaiserJ]

i use max sire

could you attach one more model, unwrapped, so that i can be sure to maintain pixel aspect with mine?

also: used fraps? or is there something better now

[Beherith]

Pixel aspect doesnt really matter.

Used fraps, but it was wonky because it only capped frames when wings had a frame change. But thats cool because it only captured the important stuff then :D

Attached the t1 con.

[KaiserJ]

and now, i realize, i only have v1 of the atlas texture (without the metal plate areas at the bottom)

looked through your svn but couldn't find the bugger

[Beherith]

http://beherith.eat-peet.net/stuff/CORE_dif.bmp
Use the above, it has teamcolor on it for the sake of simplicity.

[KaiserJ]

bah. used some open source cam thing, and the video didn't save properly. annoyed.



at least you get another model unwrapped, but still

[Beherith]

Damn shame kaiser
I had to downgrade to an old pirated version of fraps (2.9.x) to get it to work with wings.
I love what you did with the con though, how long did it take approximately?

Ill glady send you another model (aircraft or con kbot) if you enjoyed the previous one.

[KaiserJ]

i used something called CamStudio... i had done a test record for 20 mins before is started just mucking on pootube and it worked fine... i think it took me about an hour and a half maybe, but some time was wasted getting accustomed to the model, deleting mirrored parts etc

but sure, i'll give it a go again. aircrafts for 400, alex!

[Beherith]

Core construction seaplane, for 400!

[KaiserJ]

okay, done! uploading to pootube, links as they become live (might be ages)

btw i'm not sure what was up with the file but there were a lot of messy, unwelded seams... redid the wing because it would have been impossible to texture.