headus 3D tools

[project6]

In a current project the final texture map should be 256x512, aspect ratio 1:2. Can anyone shed some light on how I would prepare my UVs for this?

I want my shells to fill up as much space as possible in the 0-1 space but if I pack everything to fit in a square and then go into photoshop to paint texture the UVs are of course scaled down vertically and makes it hard to paint on.

Should I pack the shells in a 1x2 tile, box them, fit them back into the 0-1 space and then scale them vertically by 200%? If I do this and then render out a template to paint on the resulting scaling should normalize the aspect ratio. Is there any tool in UVLayout that can aid with this?

Thanks,

[headus]

In the latest release (v2.08.02) you can load in a black and white image that defines which areas to pack into (i.e. white is free, black is locked out).

So use PS or whatever to make a square image that's black in the top half and white in the lower, load that as the Trace image, then tick the "Use Trace Mask" option in the pack panel. After packing, all the shells should then be in the bottom half of the UV square.

At that point I'd then render out the UV template, but crop off the top half of the image created when you load it into PS for painting.

After you've rendered out the template, scale everything in the U direction by 2 before saving out your UVs.

If you dont have the latest release, you can do a similar thing by boxing everything first, stretch the box out into a 2 by 1 aspect ratio rectangle, then repack. Its a bit more fiddly than the pack mask method, but will work.

Phil