Blender UV's and meshes... not as fragile as I thought.

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1

I have come upon 2 thing which have made me happy, when talking about a model I have been working on for a long time;

  1. You can added faces to a mesh that is already UV mapped, and still retain the UV map. For example, against the advice I had read about low-poly modelling, I decided to leave holes in my mesh in areas I thought would never be seen. When culled by the OGRE engine, or Blender’s real time display, these faces appear from the backsied as completely transparent. Well, the holes are very apparent from certain angles.

To solve this problem, I filled two of the holes with 2 faces each. I then mapped them from a good angle, by choosing UV -> from window in the UV face select mode. I then shrunk them, and added them to an unused area of the UV map. Blender handled it fine, in fact, I actually removed some vertices, and welded these new faces to main body mesh, and the UV map still held perfectly.

  1. I did this two weeks ago. The real surprise came from that these vertices automatically seemed to parent themselves to the correct bones! The new faces move along in the animations I made weeks before, and follow the rest of the “wing” on the model.

so my question is number 2… did Blender do that? Or did I do it, and forget I did it? (possible, I suppose) Does Blender automatically assign vertices to a closest bone?

2

The vertices you fused already had weight values.

I’m not sure if blender correctly averages the values or if you just got lucky when blender tossed one of them.

3

Another great thing about UVmaping in Blender is Shift+D (duplicate a mes)

An example is the Sponza Atrium. On pillar is created (and UVmapped) then duplicated dozens of times. All pillars are already UVmapped the same.

4

I discovered this a while ago… When I took a section of road and copied it many times, much to my surprise, they all kept their UV maps. Very good to see.

5

Since some time ago, vrtices get their weigth groups value from the original vertices they are taken, Example: extruded vertices are automatically asigned to their parents group :slight_smile:

6

Wow. That is great news. Many times I have been afraid to do overhauling type tasks because of all the trouble of reassigning vertices, etc…

…but this confirmation that I actually did not assign the new vertices makes me even giddier. I was thinking about it a week later, like…“wha? Hey, those faces are moving with the correct bone! I don’t even remember thinking I had to assign them to a bone, I just threw them on, and was concerned about the UV mapping… ttally surprised to see them group themselves.”

I did not extrude, but I did “fill” the holes… actually, come to think of it, I did not add any vertices… oh… well still it is good to know vertices carry the properties of their parents.

7

Another discovery I made tonight…

Working on a fuel refinery that needs to be one mesh in the end… many pipes, and trusses, so much work… I decided to split it up into workable pieces, and started on a truss.

Then the moment of truth came, I already had a radiosity baked fuel refinery, Could I append an already detail baked truss? maybe add 2 or 3 of them, for more detail?.. When I joined the meshes… (CTRL +J) would I have to redo the entire fuel refinery?

Nope, It held both UV maps for me. Now if I am careful how I resize the UV maps, and where I place them, I can easily combine UV maps from different objects into one single object, simply by cutting and pasting in my 2d program.

Yay. :smiley: