Deathfire Daggerlisk Developer Blog, Animation Video
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 1307
And a snip from the blog entry itself:
If you are into puzzles and brain teasers, you might actually enjoy unwrapping UV texture coordinates, but it is every bit as tedious as it sounds. Honestly. Try to distribute the space on a texture as evenly as possible over all the polygons of the model, eradicating the texture from stretching or being pulled in the wrong direction. Remember, the texture map of an object is like a skin, essentially, and if you tug and pull on one end, invariably, it will affect the rest of the model. Tweaking the points where the texture is attached to the wireframe model will help minimize the impact, but is a process that is incredibly time consuming and not a whole lot of fun. We might be making games for entertainment, but the work that needs to be done to get there can oftentimes be testing your patience and become every bit as mind-dumbing as any job.
It is possible to speed up the process using some functionality built into today's software, such as relaxing the unwrap modifier, but there are still lots of minute details that you just can't fix except by hand. And even then, there will always be some glitches that will keep you going back over and over again. The process is actually so boring that I prefer to listen to TV shows or Audiobooks during the entire procedure. That way, you get some head space and you don't get itchy while checking all the polygons for hours and hours on end, until you found the optimal solution that gives you the (hopefully) least wasted texture space (Fig.D).
With all that out of the way, the next step is to check if the proportions are still the same in both models. In the case of our critter here, I bought the model from 9 million polygons (high poly) down to 9 thousand polygons. Not a bad reduction at all. You can see the difference here in the wireframe models (yes, the right half of the model is a wire frame too. It is just so dense that it looks like a surface.).
