I’m creating a model locomotive for an open source rail simulator and am moving on to texturing it to try in-game. I’ve unwrapped various surfaces into the grey UV grid but the UV stretch overlay on Area (Angle is fine, everything was blue) has it all red, but having scaled up the loco body from the grid it turns blue (pic 2). I thought the goal was to place everything within the grey UV grid. Pics attached to hopefully explain what I mean.
How do I reduce the loco body to within the grey UV grid, and not have it stretch by Area like everything else? Thanks.
If you want to fit everything in the square, the problem is the UV islands have massively mismatched sizes compared with each other. You can see it on the model, the grid texture shows big differences in texture density on different parts. This is probably messing with the stretching tool.
If you select everything and use “average island scale”, how does it react? That tool will make all the UV pieces the same size they are on the actual model (compared with each other).
Depends which texture method you use. If you need to paint the model or bake a texture, you need everything in the square and without overlaps. If you are using seamless textures (textures that can repeat with no visible borders), then you can scale and place the UVs however you want, the square doesn’t matter.
My goal is to arrange the UV faces on a 4096x4096 image file to export and paint externally, then import back the image, then export the model through the game exporter.
But now I see I’ve applied average island scale, I’m able to scale everything down into the UV grid with it all remaining blue, so just have to apply average island scale before I start arranging next time I guess? Thanks
Yes, it’s better to average the scale if you intend everything to be the same texture. The mess makes me think some parts of the mesh aren’t properly unwrapped. See if you can identify where on the object those long lines are, they look like faces that aren’t unwrapped at all.
If you have all the islands unwrapped correctly, you could use the “pack islands” tool. It will automatically place everything in the square and will likely even do a better job than you would (just leave a bit of margin in the packing settings so the islands don’t touch). The only thing is that the pieces will be in random spots, but this doesn’t matter if you will only ever work the texture by painting on the model.
Ok, thanks, I got most of those long ends sorted. I used the pack islands method, which is ok for this as I’ve used the texture paint within Blender, but I want to make a repaintable texture, I suppose I can just average islands scale, pack islands, then move and rotate the islands around to my own positions?
You can, though keep in mind you will need to redo the painting if you modify the UVs. When doing texture painting, it’s best to make sure the model and its UVs are final before painting, or you will need to redo the work.
