Welcome to my project one research and design blog.
//Another quick experiment to see if history deletion improves UV meshes
Without history deletion:
With history deletion:
It is clear to see that history deletion helped a huge amount with automatic UV generation. This is something I will be sure to always use before Mapping objects.
//A short experiment- I did 2 quick tests. One object with hand painted normals in substance, with the low poly candlestick. One object with hand painted normal in substance, with a blank (smoothed) high poly mesh baked first onto the low poly candlestick. I have concluded, that normal resolution is greatly improved when painted onto a baked high poly normal map.
Without high poly mesh baked first:
//For this test, I have taken my candlestick, and attempted to follow this tutorial, to apply colour ID to my UVs. After a lot of searching, I found that many tutorials were out of date, so I had a limited pool of knowledge to learn this, and I struggled. my first 3 attempts were all a disaster. I tried various UV maps, and struggled to get all of my objects onto one UV map. I successfully reached this point after a great amount of trial and error.
After following the tutorials again and again, I ended up with a very similar result, even though each attempt, I altered UVs, and even tried just using exact duplicates for high and low poly to make sure the colour ID applied correctly. None of this worked, and I took a break.
After a short break, I noticed that the tutorial only had one object for both high and low poly, whereas I had eight objects for each. I decided to combine all the low and high poly meshes into one high, and one low, before UV unwrapping, and after colouring the high poly meshes. I then followed the tutorial through with my two meshes, and was successful.
Unwrapping my UV as a whole also made the branch unwrap a little more cleanly. I uploaded the un-painted .fbx to Sketchfab here, to show the new UV results. Although these are still a little messy, they are an improvement on the last attempt.
I then imported my Colour ID map into Substance, and applied this, following this tutorial.
This week, I have come to realise that although I have improved my UV projections, there are still many issues.
These include;
Jon has pointed me in the direction of some helpful tutorials, so my next step will be to better improve my UVs, including learning about texel density.
//After my normal painting experiment, I realised that my UV was causing issues. I tried to correct this, by using a 12 plane projection map rather than 6.
This improved things slightly, and I was able to create a candlestick with much better normal detail, as it flowed better. I do, however, think that this could still be improved.
I did find that my textures seem quite low res, even though my maps are 4K. This is something I need to explore to find a way to stop this.
//I decided to take the low poly wood mesh of my candlestick into Substance, to practice painting normals. I followed a simple tutorial which helped me to understand how to do this, and I realised I didn’t have the brush I wanted. I needed a simple straight split, as driftwood often has this, and little other detail due to it being smoothed by the sea. I followed this tutorial, and created my own alpha brush to use.
I then applied a material on top, and adjusted the settings to make it look more like driftwood. I realised during this process, that my UV was really messing up my normal painting and textures, so this is definitely something I need to look into next. I feel as though I successfully learned the basics of hand painting normal maps inside substance painter.
I am pleased with the result, though when I checked the UV, Sketchfab made it clear how strange my map is. this will be my next task.
