Today, I continued sculpting my shelf on a different laptop. I then unwrapped the UVs manually, which went fairly successfully. I had decided to UV unwrap before smoothing, as this meant less selection, though I am unsure if this was the correct way of doing things, as my UVs warped slightly.
I used what I had learned from tutorials, and unfolded my shelf, hiding seams. I then laid these out into a UV map and exported this to Substance. I textured my Shelf, and it came out okay, but I am not entirely happy with it. It is certainly a huge improvement on what I was creating before. there are a couple of small areas where I selected the wrong part of the mesh when unwrapping, which caused two of the shelf surfaces to attach to the sides of the branch. this didn’t have too much of an effect on the final product, but it is something I need to be careful of in the future.
I learnt an important lesson when it comes to wood. I must lay out my UVs so that the grain can follow the same direction. This worked well with the surfaces of the shelf, and I had thought that having the sides the right way up would be correct, but I realised that this meant the grain goes from left to right across the entire shelf, rather than following the direction of the wood. This means that I need to take into consideration how the wood would have been put together when building the real thing, and cutting the UV up into the planks and pieces it would be made of so that they can all line up with the grain going the same way on the UV map.
I like the overall shape of the shelf, but I do not like the end result of the texturing and UV unwrap. If I am to use this as one of my final assets, I will need to re-do the UV and re-texture from there. If this is used as a final asset, I will also need to add some books and possibly a candle to show off my asset to its full potential.
Action points
- Look into the difference between unwrapping before and after a smooth
- Find a way to make my surfaces easily selectable so that I don’t accidentally select sides
- remember to consider how an object will be made in the real world, so that I can slpit UVs accordingly
- Re-make the shelf from the point of smoothing onwards if I plan to use this as a final piece.