BA5 Studio Project | Production #23

Trying to Get the Ball Rolling Again :/

For the past week or two I have felt really distanced from my work, I lost my ambition and drive to keep going and I felt I had hit a major creative roadblock which I filled with procrastination. Damn. Alas I went into uni today to try and sort myself out which I feel has worked a little. I have at least got the ball rolling again with my project and I can begin to push it into the next stage…UV MAPPING AHH D: 

My tutor Lothar was amazing today, he gave me a 1 to 1 tutorial during our 3D drop in session in which he explained and showed me the workflow process of successfully unwrapping UV’s for models.

I must clarify that in a previous post I stated that I had a mini to do list. This hasn’t gone out the window, It has just been shifted in terms of priorities.  

 My main focus at the moment is to finish unwrapping the UV#s for my bookshelf model which is what I intend to texture for the project. Lothar showed me the fundamentals to unwrapping my bookshelf today and helped me establish a workflow to follow when unwrapping future models. 

UV Mapping my Bookcase

Yaay :D So, Lothar told me that the automatic mapping tool on Maya isn’t really up to scratch, it’s more destructive than useful as I found out when it created this absolute mess of a UV map. 

 

Workflow

This is when I asked Lothar to help me because I was so confused and stuck. He then told me that the best way to work with a model and unwrapping it is to try and sort out the main segments of the model and start with the largest most prominent faces seen to the player. In my case this was the backs of each shelf, the front of the bookcase and the shelves themselves. As you can see here I divided the bookcase into 3 sections, the top, middle and bottom.

 

So, Lothar helped me do the majority of this bookcase, showing me how to use planar mapping properly to separately UV map the main areas of the model. He also showed me how to think logically about how to sew them back together by selecting edges and placing them together. Here is the final outcome after I selected the top and bottom parts to have a go myself.