Some quick texturing ?'s

[Riddlaz]

The size of your texture canvas really depends on the resolution of your renders, if your going to render it at 1024 px than somthing like 2048x2048 should get the job done but make sure the image size is perfectly square before painting.

Have you tried putting your uv modifiers below your skin and mesh smooth?

Laters,
Riddlaz C.

[gu3]

yes, i have been putting them below my meshsmooth and skin modifiers, but when I collapse them to the edit poly it makes the skin modifier stop working...

Also, my model has a bunch of armor and extranious stuff. Is it common to texture them on totally seperate textported maps?

[gaggle]

I've always tried and stay clear of mapping after skinning. And if I do it, I always cut Skin (and Meshsmooth), collapse, then paste the modifiers back in.
If possible save the Skinning data and just apply an entirely new Skin modifier and load that, as pasting modifiers is in itself not neccessairly MAX's favorte thing to do.

If you can do all your work within just the UV Unwrap modifier you can generally apply it, position it before Skin, and do your work without things fcuking up. If you're used to several UV Map modifiers and Poly Select and whatnot, I recommend the workflow described first.


Regarding seperate textures, that's a strange thing. I've been used to lowpoly, where everything generally goes on as few textures as possible. But not so for highpoly it seems. Wanna skin the top of that guy's head on a seperate texture?, go right ahead. If you have 14 textures for 14 different parts of armour, well do that if you feel you can handle the logistics..

The only limit I've encountered that dictates how to proceed has been that of resolution. If you're aiming for PAL resolution, you should have a texture-resolution of any large-ish surface of the model at.. I'd go with at least 1500x1500 pixels. It simply becomes counter-productive like you wouldn't belive, if you have your entire character on a single texture, since you'll have to generate an enormous image then to get sufficient resolution on all the surfaces. I think I ended up having to work on a 7k image my first time around.. way way too slow to work with, so I decided to split things up and generate seperate textures (one for the face, one for the top of his head, one for the buttom). The rest of the body will be done the same way, thus generating several textures, but ensuring each one can be easily modified in Photoshop without too much of a slowdown (hell even the 2 or so k of resolution feels slow-ish at times).

In that aspect the considerations for highres seems opposite of lowpoly to me, since it's a completly different set of technical limits you're hitting.


..if anyone feels like commenting on my way of doing these things, oh good lord please do so. For all I know there's some obvious flaw in my logic I've missed, I'm still fairly new at highrez texturing.

[gu3]

thanks for the tips gaggle. I think I will try using solely the UVUnwrap modifier to get the UV's for this guy. I am doing this for the first time, so I think I will be posting my progress as I go. So, keep an eye out for some f**cked up UV maps in the near future!
:)

[gu3]

one more thing...even if I just use a UVWunwrap modifier between the skin and the EP, wont it still screw the skin up when I collapse the UVWunwrap the the edit poly??

[gu3]

is it possible to just copy my mesh, UV map the copy, and then cpoy and paste those UVs to the original,therby not skrewing up the skin modifier?

[gaggle]

Yes, I think that would work gu3, loading and saving and all.

Oh, my point with using only a single UV Unwrap stuck under Skin, without the aid of UVW Map modifiers, was that you wouldn't need to collapse it. You'd just accept that the UV Unwrap modifier would be there for eternity.

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