headus 3D tools

[Tragic]

Hi there...

I know you guys are used to a more professional person, but I am just a hobbyist that is working through some courses on Digital Tutors and Gnome. That is where I got the link for UVLayout.. SO I am sorry if these are stupid questions.

Anyway... when you make a layout in UVLayout you can drag objects into new "patches"... Like a UV Layout is a "square", but you can move it out into many squares. Say I want my face to have its own huge UVspace and the rest of the body tightly packed on square 1.

Dose this mean the UVmpa that fits this layout is also in that square,next to sqaure shape I see in UVLayout? Or that each square is representing its own square bitmap...

So say I have a UVLayout like I described with the body unpacked on one "square" and the head on the 2nd "square"... in my 2D App I just make two separate and unique image maps that are just one or the other square and use them in my 3D material?

(Am I making sense lol)

Thanks again!

[headus]

The UV squares (sometimes called "tiles") are a way to get very high resolutions textures more efficiently.

Lets say you wanted to texture a dinosaur, and during your animation you get very close (e.g. just one foot fills the entire frame). If you're rendering out for 4k video or film, then your texture map needs to be at least 4k resolution (actually even 8k or more) just for the foot area.

Extend that resolution over the entire body and you could easily be looking at a map that's 100k (100,000 by 100,000 pixels). As you can imagine, that would be a very big file!

So by splitting the UVs across many tiles, you are effectively dividing that humongous single map up into multiple smaller texture maps (i.e. each tile represents a different texture map file). Now when painting or rendering, the software doing that only needs to load in the tiles/maps being used at that point, not the whole 100k.

So for example, going back to the dinosaur, when rendering that frame with the close-up of the foot, the rendering program only needs to load in the texture maps used around that area, which means faster load times and less RAM used.

For you body and head then, yes, you can put the body UVs into one tile, and the head UVs into another tile. Each tile then gets its own texture map, and in your modeling/rendering package, you assign one map to the geometry for the body, and the second map for the head geometry. As long as wrapping is enabled on the second map, then it doesn't matter that the UVs aren't in the 0 to 1 square.

Usually wrapping is on by default (well, it is in Maya, so I assume it would be everywhere else) and you have to deliberately turn it off if you don't want it, but keep that in mind if you find that the second map isn't appearing on the head polygons when rendering.

Phil

[Tragic]

Thanks a lot Phil... this is what I thought.. but I just wanted confirmation.. you are being very patient with my hobbyist / noob questions... I appreciate it..

(PS - Greetings from NSW!! Cool to see an Aussie application for once!)

[headus]

And a cooee back from Perth :) The internet is an amazing thing ... you can be anywhere really, and I don't even have to shave!

Phil