Spacecraft WIP

[lovecrafty]

Hey, I have more stuff and some enquiries to make about this space craft. I posted it first in the "Monday Night Challenge", but it's a bit quiet in there. A bit too quiet, if you know what I mean, I don't want to ramble on in there and post half the images in the thread. First off I have another image of the whole ship with some lettering I made JPG alphas out of in illustrator. Next is a close up, and my question, is it impossible to have fine detail on a model (In general for UV mapped 3d)? The texture for the ship is 4096x4096 auv tiled, so is the limiting factor for the blockiness of the result the resolution of the mesh?

http://www2.zbrushcentral.com/uploaded_from_zbc/200406/user_image-1088246392fpi.jpg

http://www2.zbrushcentral.com/uploaded_from_zbc/200406/user_image-1088246426spb.jpg

[Ron Harris]

the MNC....well sometimes it is fast paced and full of excitement and other times it gets a slow start.....just depends on what the z users are doing in the real world with their time I suppose.

As far as the textures for your craft....I dont know how to answer what you are asking probably....but I would crank up the density and try relettering the craft then and see if that takes away that blockyness you have shown.....The displacement mapping features with z2 may point you in the right direction but I am not 100 percent sure...I can divide a model close to 3 times and then my computer locks up... (old clunker here) and on a zif model I can taking it to a 6 res setting before locking up....so I would divide that mesh on the craft and then try again to letter it...if I understand things right you can then take the texture on the higher res model you create and then reapply it to the lower poly model. Or something close to that line of thought....good luck and see ya in the challenge.
ron

[Game Master 770]

I'm not sure if a higher res model will help or not, but in some cases it doesn't make sense to have UV's which are spaced out evenly to each other like GUV and AUV.

Sometimes it makes more sense to have UV's which give larger texture area to detailed mapping sections. This can be done by asigning uv's in a uv editor. Other programs handle this same problem by assigning multiple materials and uv sections to objects.

Just think of this, a simple plane (4 points) can have a whole UV map to itself, and you don't lose detail in the map cause it only has 4 points/2 faces.

[Ron Harris]

Game Master, in that instance you need a very very high resolution texture though, right? Or not? I am by no means clear on the texture mapping etc to be certain. In my mind I thought that one image could be applied to that 4 point 2 side scenario you gave. But if you have two planes like that you stretch that image from one plane to two planes right? And as the image is stretched over the planes or faces won't the texture degrade and not be able to crisply cover the surfaces? Or am I am left field on this? (which is probably the case?)

[Aztec...soljA]

I have another method contributing Ron here...
When you are done with your project, on the object's layer use the stencil with anything that you are going to imprint (your fonts)
then just paint over it with Zadd off and voila :D

[Game Master 770]

You are indead right about strecthing, Ron. It's really a matter of balance. GUV and AUV are awesome for what they do, maximize texture space, ideal for direct painting. It does not know what area is most important.

In this case, I'm sure you can also agree that alot of the texture area is unused. In this case GUV and AUV would dedicate too much space to untextured areas. I would want large UV regions dedicated to my Text. A computer wouldn't know that, so it must be manually done.

A good example is a painted human. You would want a large texture region dedicated to the face, even though it's small compaired to the rest of the body. Simply cause humans have brain area dedicated to just faces. This is also why it's easy to fool somebody by cgi with a 3d animal vs a 3d human. (has anyone been fooled yet??)

This goes for any important texture region. If you know that only a few areas need detailed texture, and the rest is fluf, you either make large uv zones for that area, or dedicate another whole texture and UV space to just that. (multi-maps) Poser is a good example. They have a map for just the head, and another for the rest of the whole body. If it's not done this way, (old versions) It looks plain chesey. Yeah you get a seam with 2 textures, but it looks way beter than 1 map.

[SpaceMan]

one way-
aruick posted a pdf tut on stencil (I do not have the link to the post)- in it one thing to do is mask out the area where you want the lettering and inverese it and then go to tool>geometry> and divide it several times that way will save resources (lower ploy count of model) then use ProjectionMaster and drop the model and apply the alpha with alpha make stencil and scale and move with the coin etc etc
see this link
web page (http://www.pixolator.com/zbc-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=4&t=001981)

[Game Master 770]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR> mask out the area where you want the lettering and .... divide it several times <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Yep, this should work perfectly for this model. By placeing more polygons in the text area, you are also giving it more UV space.

[lovecrafty]

Thanks for the responses everybody, here is an update of testing some of the recommendations. Spaceman, the idea of higher resolution of the mesh where I want to paint the text seems logical and resulted in this mesh:

http://www2.zbrushcentral.com/uploaded_from_zbc/200406/user_image-1088384437tpi.jpg

I made a new texture (again max res) and applied AUV tiling again but the results were grainy again. I made yet another texture and applied GUV tiling which produced a much better result in that area:

http://www2.zbrushcentral.com/uploaded_from_zbc/200406/user_image-1088384586zzr.jpg

It turns out I do not need the extra mesh resolution with the GUV tiles, here is a bit of the side of the ship plastered with text and symbols, and you can see the texture resolution is better than the mesh resolution:

http://www2.zbrushcentral.com/uploaded_from_zbc/200406/user_image-1088384699euk.jpg

So maybe all my problems involve limitations to how AUV tiling works. I noticed it took my PC about 10 minutes to calculate the GUV tiling, so it must be a more complex set-up than the AUV tiles. Anyway as Game Master 770 points out mapping multiple textures to the model would allow very high detail in certain areas. I can do that in 3DS-max I think, but not in Zbrush as far as I can tell, unless I break the model into pieces and texture them separately. Thanks for the discussion!