Character Building...

[Mr Fudge]

Also I would like to know if there is a way to mesh smooth something without the textures stretching as it obviously a lot easier to texture a low res poly mesh, as you are working with much fewer UV's.

Thanks Agian,
Fudge

[mastering3d]

Well from what you’re saying it sounds like you’re having allot of problems. If I unstained you right you want to texture a character
In low poly and have know texture stretching...

Well if your making a texture to fix on to low poly model and then adding mesh smooth it will be stretched because you’re adding some thing that was not there before. I have come across these problem meany times in the past. So to still work with low poly and end up with a high poly mesh with out any stretching is to do this.

Unwrap all the mesh the way that you have been doing it and when you have done that add a mesh smooth to it before saveing it out as a template ,So when you work on the template it will be highpoly and not low ploy’s by saving it out as a high poly meshed template you will make your texture to fit that .So when you come back to your 3d program and add the texture to the model it will be the same as the model is with the mesh smooth on it.

It’s a bit like having a shoe that is too small and trying to fit it over a foot that is to big how it will look (stretched) .But if you have the same size shoe to fit the same size foot it will fit right...

Hope that helps you out..


By the way what 3d progam R you runing..

[Mr Fudge]

I am using Maya. I do not have the option of adding a mesh smooth modifier like in max and toggling between the two.

You have been quite helpful. But could you tell me in what order you go about building your character? Do you skin the low res version first and then mesh smooth it and then texture it? And once you have done that how do you get rid of the extra nodes in the history pallete that have been created during the texturing process and still retain the skinning info???

The places where the stretching is most apparent is where the mesh smooth has sub divided Nth sised polys and when you have two edges very close to each other.

So to recap, tell me step by step what order you create your character in. Bearing in mind that I have a lowpoly box modelled character that I intend to mesh smooth???

Thanks,
Fudge

[Mr Fudge]

But wait. If you leave the texturing till after the skinning that means that you will have to texture both sides of your character seperately. This will double your workload and create descrepencies between the two halves.

So can someone please tell me the order in which they create, smooth, texture and skin their character????

Please, Please it's doing my head in. :( Cos I can have a high res textured character that I am unable to skin or an untextured skinned character. :(

Waiting with baited breath,
Mr Fudge

[mastering3d]

When your saying skining are you going on about rigging or skining is the same thing as textureing ,You can use the tearm skining = textureing can you make your self more clear for us to help you out..

But as I have said to you..

The way to do it is to make your model as low as you can .

Then when your happy with the way that your model came out,
Start to brake it up for unwraping.Which by the sounds of it you have done..

When you have unwraped the model then you put the uvw on it on each part or what ever way is best for you to work.When you have done all that you make a high res mesh seeing as you said you dont have meshsmooth in maya.And then just save out templats to us in photoshop or what ever 2d software that you use.So when you make you textures and come back to maya you will have high res texture that fit the high res model as you have used the high res templat...So if theres away of turneing the meshsmoothing back of in maya the textrue should still look ok on the model.And you can still work on it in lowpoly mode and not in high poly mode..

Hope this helps..Is there not any any one out there that can help this guy out .As I do not no any thing about MAYA..Come on some one help Him...

[Mr Fudge]

Ahhha, I see what you mean about mesh smoothing and rendering out the UV's for the high poly one and then using it on the low poly one. That sounds like a good technique and I will do well to remember it. But in this instance I don't think it will work.

You see the only way to get rid of the stretching is to amend the actual UV's of the High Poly version. So even if I kept the Texture map from the high poly version I would still get stretching problems when I mesh smoothed.

And when I talk of skinning I am referring to creating a skeleton and binding the skeleton to the mesh. Preferably a low poly mesh as like I said earlier it is easier to adjust the weights and deal with generally from a processing point of view.

Thanks for your efforts though.

Maybe some kind Maya guru will smile on my desperate situation...:annoyed:

[Mr Fudge]

Just to clarify if there is any confusion. I have attached several relevant images. The first is a boned and skinned untextured pilot. The next is a fully textured high poly mesh-smoothed version of the same pilot. However I am having trouble boning/skinning him due to the huge amount of verts involved. It is very difficult to manage the weighting and one gets very different results if one compares them with the low poly version that has been skinned and then mesh smoothed. Not to mention that my PC buckles under the strain of having to skin such a dense object/mesh. The third image is the UV's of the high poly mesh. There are no stretches on the texture as the mapping was done after it was mesh smoothed. So if someone is adept in this area could you please tell me what step that I am missing?

Thanks,
Fudge

[Mr Fudge]

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[Mr Fudge]

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[mastering3d]

No Problem man ...

You would think on a board like this you would get help.I dont see why no one is welling to help you.As it seams that you know what you are doing and just getting stuck on some thing .All I can say is come on you guys & gals out there help this man out .He needs help and may he will no some thing that you dont when you need help.And whats he going to do well i know what I would do if I did not get any help.I would not help you guys out ..



By the way your model looks great it is a very cool looking model and sorry if I could not help you out but maya is not my thing...

[leigh]

Hey there :)

Sorry, I meant to reply yesterday, but got extremely busy :sad:

Unfortunately my Maya experience is extraordinarily limited, but what I can say is that I always unwrap and apply textures before subdiving the mesh to such an extent.

However, I do always model with subdivision surfaces, so I'm sure the process differs from that point anyway.

That stretching that is happening ALWAYS happens with UVs. All you have to do to fix it is edit your UVs a little - stretching the actual UVs shrinks the stretching in the texture ;)

I would recommend not smoothing the mesh out before UV-ing and skinning and all that. As you have said, it just results in a nightmare.

Let me know if this helps :)

[Mr Fudge]

Using Sub D's poses the same stretching problem.

I did assume that, that would be the most sensible way to go about things. But it would make precise texture placement very difficult if you are ultimately going to alter the UV's anyway after you have Sub D'd or Mesh-Smoothed.

Maya has a great tool called Relax UV's which does a pretty good job of smoothing out and equally spacing your UV's but like everything it needs a lot of hand tweaking to get it perfect.

When I look on the web at other peoples work I never seem to see the same stretching problems.

But I guess this whole experience has confirmed my suspicion that it is best to texture, then skin and then mesh smooth or use SS.

- Fudge

[leigh]

Yeah, especially since when you regard the way in which UVs are calculated (with values inbetween being interpolated), it makes sense that it's far simpler to apply them before any smoothing takes place. Especially since you inevitably will need to tweak the UVs once you've applied the texture maps, to avoid the stretching that results.

Sure, all modelling methods end up with minor stretching here and there, it's just that some are easier to tweak than others.

Relax UVs does indeed sound cool, but as you mentioned, nothing is perfect first time round.

I guess there is no way to ever avoid tweaking stuff.

[Mr Fudge]

I textured a low poly tank top, then meshsmoothed and here is the result. With lots of stretching.

[Mr Fudge]

And this is what it looks like after I "relax" the UV's. It's OK but still not an ideal way to get perfect texture placement. And it also means you will have a few extra nodes on your mesh above your skinning information. I don't know how to get rid if them. Maya doesn't have a "Collapse To" option in the modifier stack like Max does. At least not as far as I am aware.

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