I have been developing some things on Blender for a while now and yesterday, I decided to train to make stylized low-poly assets, after finishing the mesh, one of the things that I am struggling to comprehend is UV Mapping, which we consider in Brazil, a rocket science!
For instance, I tried replicating a free stylized low-poly bush and it worked, however, for texturing (that uses a gradient image), not that much… I asked a colleague to help me out, and the result is somewhat close, but it has parts that trigger me regarding perfection.
Upon the results, I would like to know how I can accomplish as expected from the bush. If anyone knows how and even has advice and/or tips on how I can improve for future creations, I would appreciate and it would make my day!
Posting some image would help us understand what you’re asking for.
For absolutely perfect UV mapping you’d probably want every face in the UV map to be exactly the same area size as the face in 3d. Then paint directly in the 3d viewport with a high quality program like substance painter that does not care if the faces being painted on in 3d are miles away from each other on the uv map. Another approach would be to dramatically increase the resolution of the 3d object, vertex paint it in zbrush, then bake the results to an image texture so it doesn’t matter how good the UV’s actually are.
I have never done any of these things myself. Just my best guess based on watching other people work online.
I am posting the images with each reply because, if you are unaware, forum users who have Trust Level new user, cannot post one more than an embedded media file… Either way, you can find them above of my reply!
Furthermore, can you explain better how to utilize Adobe Substance 3D Painter? I got confused and a better explanation would be better! I can at least assure you that I am still learning how to use this texturing software. However, I do not have ZBrush (too expensive )…
I imagine if you grab some vertices from the middle part of your UV map, and move those towards the lighter area on your texture, you’ll get a result that looks more like the one on the right.
Here, I made an example with a rounded cube and a gradient image from the internet (never mind the artifacts, I’m not good at making gifs…). As I move the vertices on the left, you can see the texture change on the right.
That is what my colleague said to me… Something like this… Once making the UV into a “pencil”, I did something as you said within the GIF, but it has some areas that appear some diagonal lines…
I see what you mean. I think you can improve it by moving around individual vertices in your UV map, but it’s hard to tell exactly what to change when I don’t know precisely what vertices in your UV map correspond to which parts of your mesh. Here I’ve made some guesses:
If those guesses are correct, then you’ll wanna move the vertices marked in pink to a lighter color (so upwards on the UV map), or the ones marked in dark blue to a darker color (so downwards on the UV map), and then the same for the next ring of vertices which I haven’t marked.
Your reference model seems to have its UVs arranged a bit differently, but you should be able to achieve a nice smooth gradient regardless. Perhaps something like the Magic UV add-on can make the process a bit less fiddly, although I’ve only barely started to learn that one, so I’m not sure.
I am trying to do what you said, but I think I am having a problem because after selecting all of the faces, unwrapping, making them in the same position, and making them in a pencil format, all of the vertices are now together and making confusion to pick those as pinky
Ok, it looks pretty much like I thought - if you grab a pair of vertices and move them on the y axis, you can see the diagonal lines getting better or worse depending on which way you move them:
)…
