Symbiosis DevDiary #2
UW-mappingAs it is one of my tasks to generate the majority of the UW maps it has occupied me almost the entire week. Since the first week consisted mainly of spitting out assets for our level designer to work with we could finally start focusing on UW-mapping and texturing. Since the game world in Symbiosis is a forest full of crazy trees, mushrooms and flowers, all models are very organic. Strange shapes and details are common and even t I will show an example of one of the trees in the game and how I did the mapping This first image shows the tree in wireframe-mode to more easily show the complexity of the edge-flow. For most of the time the model consist of a simple and organic cylinder. But there are two places where the edge-flow breaks and the model is stitched together to emphasize the bends. The first challenge I faced were to decide where to put the seam. I rotated the object a bit to find the least attractive angle, which unfortunately is the only one I will show here. As seen in the image below I decided to put the seam along the trunk as well as in the stitched part at the bottom. I filled in the seam with a black line to make it more visible in the picture. I have never boasted about my UW-mapping skills since it not something I have focused on earlier, but I wanted to practice so this became the perfect opportunity. The hardest part to get right was the big bend at the bottom (bottom picture). It really wanted to stretch the further from the seam it came, but I manage to minimize the distortion by doing some vertex by vertex tweaking. One other thing I never managed to fix was some odd polygons right under the bend at the top (top picture). No tweaking from my part managed to get the distorted six under control but since it is right next to the seam which is never going to show in-game I let it be.  |
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