BA6 | Specialism #23

Organising UV’s Ready for Ambient Occlusion (yep…more UV posts *sigh*)

This post is incredibly UV image heavy!! 

Don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoy UV’s and the unwrapping process. I think it’s rooted in my OCD nature and how I try to make everything fit perfectly together and look neat and precise. However with deadline less than 2 weeks away this really is the last time I can worry about them in so much detail. Especially when I have spent the entire day at uni working on making them ready for an ambient occlusion bake only to get home and find out none of my work ever actually saved and now I am an entire day behind. 

RAGE.

After screaming at the top of my voice and punching all the pillows on my bed in anger and frustration I moved on and manned up. I re did ALL the work I had done during my day at uni. Some, to my delight, actually turned out better than I remember it being during the day, however, other elements also weren’t quite “right”. Like I said though, no time to *really* go back and be picky unless I really need to. 

So, after all this, my task was to re size some of the larger UV’s, combine the models and UV maps to reduce the amount of work needed in the future (oh the irony). Lothar, my tutor, had told me the correct way to UV the ropes was to cut them up into segments and enlarge them to get more detail. Leaving them as one long UV would mean no seam but less detail. I can work on the seams where I have cut up the UV’s when I texture it.  As my friend at uni, Robin, stated, I could easily move and combine some of my models onto the same UV sheets to reduce space and work. So this is what I have done. Ill just post up screen shots for how they look currently before I try to bake some ambient occlusion onto them. 

I know this may seem like over the top documentation, and I don't expect anyone else to take much notice in this. It's really for my own benefit to see how I progressed and improved my UV's so that when I produce work in the furture I can refer back to a detailed blog about the unwrapping process and remind myself of where I went wrong and what I did right so I can continue to learn. Sorry if this is just boring for you to look at :P