Friday 21 February 2014

Tower Project



Having a break from major project at University I decided that I would look into how to unwrap buildings in a proper fashion and to games industry standard. For this I followed a very easy step by step guide tutorial done by Digital Tutors an online tutoring company.

They started me off by going through some of the basic tools found within 3DS Max 2014 as I have previously had problems unwrapping in this edition of the software and most of the time reverted back to the 2013 edition to get my outcomes.




By starting to unwrap a basic sword it was nice and simple and was able to give me the chance to get used to the tools. Something I've never really used when unwrapping which noticed is of great importance is the relax by face angels. The tools used was a simple but effective way to unwrap this object. (Planar, Cylinder, Break and Stitch)





The next stage of the tutorial was going through how to unwrap a rock. This was simple and easy to follow giving me the knowledge to create my own rocks and unwraps for my major project in the near future. The technique used was mentioned as the tennis ball effect where the white strip of the ball becomes the seam-line on the unwrap.



The next stage in development of personal skills was learning how to unwrap for normal mapping and how to ensure your normal maps work effective and efficient. Digital Tutors show a few different techniques on how to solve the issues. The more efficient way for this object was to add in a few extra edge loops. Also another technique shown was smoothing groups, these are very useful when making assets for games as it allows the user to smooth the mesh without changing topology. This was very helpful section as I knew what smoothing groups were I just didn't fully understand how to go about using them until now.   




Finally got to unwrapping the tower. Even though I am comfortable in the unwrapping process I wanted to see if there was anyway I could speed up my process and see where I might of missed out on. With the main tower itself I learned many processes such as being able to unwrap the main brickwork I would of simply applied a cylindrical mapping to it and map it fit, however as this was a atlas map I couldn't do that but learned by creating multiple seams and over laying them it allows the texture to tile perfect.

Another new technique I learned was unwrapping the top of a cylinder like object as usually the process I would of used was to simply select all the top faces and applied a planar map to it. However the new technique learned for situations like this is to break down the cylinder into quarters and overlapping them as shown in the image above this makes it so that the texture is more crisp and higher resolution.     



Throughout the whole project I used the tiled option found within the UV editor to create my UV's this helped me to make quick selections and ensure a clean UV once completed I then compacted the UV's back to the 1 to 1 space and then removed the tiled option from the editor. The left image shows the unwrap compacted down. I then learned that you can copy and paste UV unwrap modifiers so as the windows was the same mesh I could do this then afterwards edited them to make up the window. But at least most of the work was done for me.



This image shows the unwrap of one of the wooden structures this was very simple to unwrap. Once I done one I simply just duplicated it around the tower itself.




Finally I added some steps and unwrapped them as shown in the image. I also added two planes for the alpha mapped handle.

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