Vega Strike Forums

Well, it takes me 1 to 3 days to come up with an initial unwrap; but longer than that yet again to get it
exactly right.
First comes the AO bake tests: You bake an AO, load it on the model as a texture, and then you see
where there are artifacts; and that helps you discover two types of mesh/unwrap problems; make that
three:

• Shadow shifts: Say a little boxy greeble stands on a large polygon; often its little shadow can shift sideways after baking; and you need to subdivide the large polygon to provide a nearer anchor point. Specially when the AO bake is made from a subsurf'd mesh, --which all AO's must be made from, otherwise they don't look very smooth at all.
• Inter-island leakage: Islands too close to each other in the UV map cause edge artifacts onto each other.
• Polygons too thin, needing an extra seam and/or pixel alignment: Thin borders around windows, or polygons in thin strips or bevels often need to be "snapped to pixels". Imagine a strip that maps to single texel width on the UV map: It will be shaded completely wrongly if that texel's worth of width spans half a texel from one row and half a texel from another, in the texture. The AO bake for it will be completely wrong. It needs to be "snapped to pixels". And if the angle it forms with the neighboring polygons in the same island is sharp, it won't play nice with filtering of any sort. (As a general rule, ALL sharp edges should have seams, for this reason.)

Once I'm done fixing the above kinds of problems, and once I start baking tangents and binormals, I find polygons that are not properly oriented, or that are badly deformed, etceteras, from looking at the colors in the bakes.
So, it DOES take time.
I'm not going to ask artists to bake tangents and binormals; I'll do it for them, for now; but I WILL ask them to bake AO's and show good quality AO bakes, without artifacts; --a test which this ct3000 would not pass as is, with the current unwrap.

True, I too do the AO bake just to test the quality of the unwrap.
I tend to put the baked AO texture as a background in blender's UV editor to further guide me.

Looks awesome, can't wait! Though I prefer the sandy versions to the white.

I like it very much too. Is development ongoing?
Did the UV unwrap turn out OK?

Shark wrote:Looks awesome, can't wait! Though I prefer the sandy versions to the white.

Shark wrote:I like it very much too. Is development ongoing?
Did the UV unwrap turn out OK?

I don't think the UV unwrap are done then it could be still made
but i will not do it for sure
as my handle of Blender doesn't match with current needed skill.
but i can share the generic texture i made for texture both starship

or i can be only Texturer as i have very few spare time now

tried running this through unitconverter and in-game but it comes out too dark, not sure why.. Think it may have been my fault as I had to export the obj (as well as exported the aidi obj so that could be my fault as well)