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Topic:	game uv (1 of 7), Read 45 times
Conf:	Rendering and Materials
From:	Matthew Demaray
Date:	Tuesday, July 22, 2003 09:09 AM

You know when you see game textures sheets for characters and they have two 1024 maps one for like the head and for the body? How are the uvs's set up for that? Do you just uv the head then pull it to the side then uv the body or is there something that you set up with map channels or shading groups or something. I apologize if this is common knowledge.

Thanks for the time

Topic:	game uv (2 of 7), Read 29 times
Conf:	Rendering and Materials
From:	Eric Chadwick
Date:	Tuesday, July 22, 2003 01:27 PM

One UV channel, but two Material IDs, using a Multi/Sub-Object material type with two Standard sub-materials, one for the head, the other for the body.

In UVWUnwrap, you can filter the display to show just a single matID, so the head and body UVs are overlapped, but can be edited separately.

Eric Chadwick
Whatif Productions LLC

Topic:	game uv (3 of 7), Read 26 times
Conf:	Rendering and Materials
From:	Josh Jones
Date:	Wednesday, July 23, 2003 07:05 AM

We avoid using multi-subobjects if possible, for Exporter reasons, and pretty much as you said, Unwrap a section of a character at a time and arrange it in Unwrap UVW. Also, Max 5's Unwrap UVW modifier has some nice features for automatically creating texture sheets. The tutorial with the plane should give you some insight into using that tool.

-josh

Topic:	game uv (4 of 7), Read 26 times
Conf:	Rendering and Materials
From:	Eric Chadwick
Date:	Wednesday, July 23, 2003 08:07 AM

Josh, I'm curious how you've set up your exporter, if you wouldn't mind sharing a little. If you're using different maps for head and body, what do you do?

Is there a benefit in your engine to less material IDs? There is in ours, but it is a relatively small benefit. Basically, less materials = longer tri-strips, or less vert chunks to send to the GPU = slightly faster rendering.

But in this case for us, the increased texture res of two bitmaps is a preferred tradeoff. Also, the surfaces can have different properties, like one can activate special rendering passes, saving the other surface from having to make unused passes.

Just curious how others do it.

Eric Chadwick
Whatif Productions LLC

Topic:	game uv (5 of 7), Read 9 times
Conf:	Rendering and Materials
From:	Josh Jones
Date:	Thursday, July 24, 2003 07:33 AM

Eric,

From what little I understand from the programming side of things, the reason we avoid multi-subs is that whenever the engine encounters a Mat ID seam, it doubles up on vertices. (It essentially treats the object as multiple objects.) I gather this might be similar to your engine in the sense that it would also mean more tri-strips, etc. However, we do not use single meshes for our characters, but break our characters up into body parts. So in essence, we are using multiple maps for head and upper body, etc. Our particular needs require that our characters be modular, since we can swap out clothing and armor throughout the game. BTW, we're using Gamebryo for our engine.

-josh

Topic:	game uv (6 of 7), Read 6 times
Conf:	Rendering and Materials
From:	Eric Chadwick
Date:	Thursday, July 24, 2003 07:45 AM

Cool, thanks for sharing. We have basically the same structure. We generally fuse the parts back together for a seamless skin, but we could do separate ones too which you found made sense for modular characters.

What do you think of Gamebryo, from an artist's perspective? I haven't used it... I wonder where it breaks down or gets difficult to use.

Eric Chadwick
Whatif Productions LLC

Topic:	game uv (7 of 7), Read 2 times
Conf:	Rendering and Materials
From:	Josh Jones
Date:	Thursday, July 24, 2003 10:46 AM

Gamebryo so far has been fairly easy to work with, but unfortunately I don't have much to compare it to. This is the first game project I've worked on where I've been involved in the early stages of prototyping and working with new technology and so forth. (My past experience has been mostly pre-rendered output or game output with the art specs already nailed down.) So now I'm a bit more involved in pushing the envelope of the engine, art-wise at least. My only major complaint thus far has been mediocre to poor documentation on the tools and supported Max features, that and some clunky interfaces with some of their art-viewing tools. On the other hand, though, the support guys at NDL have been very responsive and are great about answering emails within a very timely manner (same- or next-day).
-josh

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