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kyuketsuki
06-26-2008, 06:56 PM
In the example image below I have highlighted two items of interest;

RED Arrows - When building a UV map for the object in question (for gaming application) is there an easy way (Maya) to map out very small ridges like this? In some cases I just let the map smear on these spots because once the noise, detail and such are applied it is hardly noticed. Would this be acceptable in the realm of a professional game? I know that this could be taken care of in some respects with a normal map, but I would like to have the silhouette reflect the shape, so I prefer the modeled approach. One way I do use is to grab the edge in question in the UV Editor and pull everything from there and up (or down) and pull out the map, this works, but not in all situations and can be tedious. I am looking for a better method.

YELLOW Arrows - This is a table with glass in it. Once I make the faces that are the glass partially transparent, you can see into the hollow body of the actual object. Should I just assume that I should close the table off and add the glass as a separate object combined so that there is only one UV map? Should I leave it as it is? It seems a bit messy to allow the player to see into the object.

Thanks in advance.

http://davidaclifton.com/Posted/Table_Example_02.jpg
LaughingBun
06-26-2008, 07:41 PM
for the second question just make the glass a second object. orrrrr I dont use maya but cant you have hidden faces in it? like create a polygon where you would be seeing into the model.

anyways there is no shame in making a mesh that isnt 100% contiguous
Swizzle
06-26-2008, 07:42 PM
The first thing that hits me is curiosity as to why so have all those cuts that don't add anything to the silhouette of the table. You could easily achieve exactly the same shape with probably a third (or less!) or the triangle count.

If you want to UV map very small ridges, there are a number of different options for what you can do depending upon what you want to do with them. If you want them to have a different material than the rest and you're not concerned about having some sort of discernible pattern on the strips, just unwrap them as individual little pieces and put them in a small corner of your UV map. This will let you paint over all of them at once without having to worry about doing a bunch of annoying hyper-detailing when you're painting textures. If you're planning on giving them the same material as the rest, then you should be able to use some sort of projection to get each side flat on the UV map, and then just do a bit of polygon pushing to make sure there's no distortion.

For the glass, just do a separate piece and seal all the holes. You're going to be doing a completely different material for that piece anyway, so just make it separate from the rest. You could even unwrap it separately so you could give it a very small texture. In fact, you may not even have to UV map it, depending on the intended game engine; you might just be able to assign some pre-built glass shader.

Back to the tri count: This thing needs some serious optimization. It looks like what you're doing is a lot of extruding to get those raised edges. That's just fine, but you will need to get rid of the excess edges once you're done.
Instead of doing a paintover (since these aren't really good images for doing paintovers on) I whipped this up really quick in Modo and Photoshop:

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y29/xkostolny/example001.jpg

See how few edges there are while maintaining the same shape? That's a very good thing.
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