[Bobboau]

Lynx is nuts, lith owns. TS's exsisting UV editing capabilitys are very limited in what you can do Lith has almost all tools you could want. just make sure you get the latest (free) version.

[Bobboau]

http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/blackwater/lithunwrap_setup.zip

[Lynx]

Originally posted by KARMA

if you are going to map anything more complex than a cube without an unwrapper you are going to make a weird job or you are going to waste your time.

Hehe, check out the WCS forum, every ship textured by me is purely UV-mapped in TS, it's neither impossible nor hard.

[Bobboau]

I know for a fact that it isn't imposable, but it is far harder than just useing Lith.
I know I used to do all my UV mapping in TS before lith was known about.

[KARMA]

yup, I unwrapped in TS too, so I know what I'm talking about.
It surely isn't impossible, it's just time wasting and less accurate.
I unwrapped in TS by scaling and moving the uvspaces, using both the calculator and trials and errors method, and I also found anotbher technique, which we can call of the inverse repetition (you use repetition factors <1 to move the relative position of the texture) which is faster but less accurate.
Then I started using lith and I called me stupid for having wasted so much of my time before.
Whenever you want to use only a portion of a texture, mapping without an uveditor is as fun as hitting a wall with the head.
Not that Lith hasn't flaws.
For example, the memory usage when you have too materials or too big textures, expecially on low performance systems, like mine.
The conversions between formats (expecially 3ds and obj) aren't the best possible.
The uvmaps are always represented as squares.
You can uvmap only along the axis, so it can cause distorsions when you have diagonal faces, and you can't deform the uvspaces as you can do in TS (for example, if you want to uvmap cutted cones).
But those are minor flaws compared to the amount of time saved  and the precision gained in editing the uvmaps by using lithunwrap

[Nuke]

when i used ts4 i used a program called unwrapper to monitor mapping progress, however the tools had their limits, you cant edit after you uv map something, and working with large numbers of polies at once is frustrating at best. another usefull tool was uvtweak, which allowed me to map fill up the unwraper square and then translate the whole map a texture length to give me more space. then 4 of them could be merged into a single texture.

now im using ts6 so uv mapping is easyer thanks to the ade of the uv editor. to make the uv editor a little easyer to use i usually give individual groups of polygons which i will map together different materials. this prevents the uv editor from getting overcluttered. use  space in the uv editor liberally at first, overlapping several texture widhs out of the box to aleviate clutter. once all groups are mapped out, apply a new material to the whole ship. this will merge all the uv space into one material, so care must be taken to ensure that the groups will not overlap (if they do i hope you have of pain killers handy). then you can stretch and shrink and whatever to get everything to fit in one square. you can also group subobjects together and edit all uv maps on all subobjects simultaniously. this is goof if you dont want to use another texture for your turret. the ultimate goal is to map everything on a ship into a single texture. so have fun

[Bobboau]

here's a little trick I've been useing lately, use a low resolution random noise texture while UV mapping, try to make all the pixels the same size on the object. after you have broken the uv space into seperate sections, then all you have to do is try to fit everything into a roughly square shape (and if you can't then get it into a 1:2 rectangle)

[Starman01]

I think I will give Lithunwrap a try at my next vacation end of januar. Currently I'm mapping a complex hangar-structure with Lynx's method. It is definitly a lot of work all this try and error, on the other hand the tutorial for Lithunwrap looks very complicated to me, guess I will need much time (and mood) for this

About my repeating texture problem, guess I stay by the method braking of the hangarwall into several segments and give everything the same UV-Map, the rest is some photoshoping.

Now I wish I could only create better textures on my own

[KARMA]

another useful trick for the lith users is to paint different group of faces with different solid colours in TS.
When you open the model in lithunwrap, you'll have all those group of polys already assigned to a different material each, making your life incredibly easyer, since another flaw of lith is the selection of the polys on complex models.
Once you have prepared the uvmaps of the different group of polys on the different materials, you can merge all those uvmaps into the definitive material(s) for the final work.

[Bobboau]

hmm.... that's a good idea...

just try Lith for a few hours, if you've already got a partaly UV mapped model that's even better. this is the basick work ruteen for lith, select faces->give them a projection (tools->UVmapping->(usualy)decal)->scale->move a lot of times you'll take advantage of the colapse functions to seal seams or to align verts

[Nuke]

i find truespace's tools very usefull so i perfer that over lith.  i used to use a univorm uv scale on everything but you can give more space to higher detail areas. and less to places you really arent gonna be looking at . trhuster ports on fighters for example dont need to be all that high detail cause you can never see it through the thruster flames anyway. 1024^2 and bigger maps kinda help though.

[Starman01]

Oooookay, I think I'm getting a hang of this now. I'm still working with the truespace-method, and as long as I keep my detail-map simply and don't need to tile too much, it works pretty good

But now I need another technical advice, so I can understand the background better. This here is our current Confed-Turret-Model (I know, it is low poly, before the release comes, I will make a better one at least for LOD0). Before I started this topic, I used three textures for this thing: awactile1, awactile2 and xbeam.pcx.


Now I created the UV-texture for it, and use only one texture for the whole turret.


I know HT&L has a limit of 16 texture per subobject. So actually it wouldn't hurt, if the turret-submodels will have additional textures. Now my question is as simple as that :

The new detail-texture is always bigger than one of the smaller textures. What is better for the performance ?

a) Using this bigger detail-texture on all LOD's (of course the one from LOD1 is lower resolution) and give the entired model  overall less textures

b) Using three maps at LOD0, and only a small one (the dark "awactile2") at LOD1 ?

I hope you understand what I mean.

[Nuke]

htl seems to work better when fewer textures are used. but it does allow you to use higher res textures without much of a noticable performance drop. so something that once took a bunch of 256 textures can use a single 1024^2 texture instead. if you want to take advantage of dds textures your textures need to be square though.