Prior to this I had already UV'd the glass bars on the cell walls, but everything else I'd built as a new model using the blockout as a guide for scale. Which means that everything else needs to be UV mapped.
As you can see by the UVs on the background scene, remapping is very much needed.
I started off with the bigger pieces: the walls, floor and ceiling. I reasoned that I would get the biggest visible pieces done so I could use them to set the scale of the smaller pieces. Once they were done, I started on the chess pieces.
This is what it looked like when I used Automatic Mapping on a chess piece, because I was stumped for a bit as to how exactly I was going to map one. This is AFTER I did some cleaning up.
The pawns were also the simplest chess pieces to map, in comparison to the wonderful bishop. I did eventually find that the simplest way was to use Automatic Mapping, and then stack all the variants of the pieces on top of each other. Eventually I was able to muddle through and get all the chess pieces modelled: my initial UV map was looking like this:
The rest of the interior assets were UV'd in a similar method: to save time for me to work on other projects, and so I could be as thorough as possible within the time constraints. My initial UV map was updated to look like this:
Finally, I UV'd the background scene and the pipes. The pipes I was able to stack on top of each other perfectly, due to them being copied from the same model, and my first 'full' UV map looked like this:
To test out how the map would function with Unreal's lighting, I imported the model in and set up some test lights. I lit from multiple angles outside but kept the interior of the cell dark: the first lighting pass looked like this:
As you can see, something rather nasty happened with the door. While the rest of the model appears fine, the door's lighting data has been confused. Looking at the UV map, I realised my supposedly genius strategy of saving space by stacking the UVs on top of each other had failed: because the interior and exterior door were on top of each other, the lighting data got confused, and showed both the dark interior and lit exterior lighting at once. To fix this problem, I simply separated the door UVs and rearranged the space.
Once I was happy that I wasn't getting more lighting glitches, I remembered that I wouldn't be able to apply a glass material to the individual glass parts of the door because they were all counted as one object. I then decided to separate the glass from the centre frame, and the resulting map looked like this:
After making this map, I put the model back into Unreal and relit.
To give me a better idea of how the model would look once materials were added, I created a quick 'Translucent' material and applied it to all models that would use glass. I then added some quick interior lighting to fill out the scene:
The resulting scene, with translucency and interior lighting, looked like this.
The cell looked good, but as you can see, there was a weird lighting effect on the background walls. I went back into the UV map and separated all the interior walls from the exterior. I also moved all the individual pieces together to make the map more sensible. My final UV map looks like this:
Applying this map to Unreal resulted in this:
Edging ever closer to the final look, I'm very happy with the UVs looking like this: any lighting glitches that would take away from the scene aren't visible in the main scene, and I am now all set up to start making materials! See you next time!
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