Jaja, a nice video tutorial is need for see the correct way to uv-map an object ...

What part of it gives you the headache?

Ok, now first remember that I had no training in this area at all. By trade, I am self employed as a painter/decorator/home maintenance. Blender is my hobby, and I picked it up first time about 9 months ago.

Everything I know I have discovered by trial - error and reading tutorials.

Now:

its easy to UV a low poly mesh, because, well there are not many surfaces. So the way I did it with this ship was :

1 - make a low poly model to serve as a general guide for the rough shape of the ship

2- make a high poly model 

3- bake the ambient oculsion onto the UV mapped low poly model and export the pic

4- draw the texture with the ambient oculsion serving as a base

5- and this is the hardest one for me: map the finished texture onto the high poly model.

No. 5 is extremely slow process, since many faces are at wrong/awkward angles, and I have to often manually map every vertex by hand, and that takes hours with a mesh that has got 4000 polygons.

I did try to look for a way to "map" the low poly model onto the high poly mesh, but the best way I have figured so far was to smart UV the high poly and then bake the texture. The problem with this is that the smart UV is extremely wasteful with the available space in the texture, so it end up looking far worse on the high poly, and also I cannot use the same texture on both meshes, since they both have different UV layout...

Is better if you start doing a correct uv-map of the high poly mesh, with big patience you can map all individual faces of the object and after and after you can ordinate all in your squared texture (i have do that this morning for the first time) and after you can start painting, make a low poly is not to hard and with distance you don't see if ther'is some errors

for 1 little ship i need 3 hours this morning for map all

P.S.

For this big ship you use a texture 2048x2048 ?

I'm in the same boat, I never had any formal education in 3d (except for a bit at my last semester). I've picked the crumbles of information and methods over the years of reading about it and trial and error. ( i've even discovered my method of mesh simplification by accident when I was working on my first ship for Pioneer). And for that 9 months, you are gaining speed pretty fast. 🙂 i'm sure your painting skills help a lot too.

I usually do it this way:

1. I model the highest LOD first with as much detail as needed (right now I' aiming for a 10k tri max, but these were small ships.)

2. When I think the form is ready, I start unwraping. First I create a 2k color grid texture in the UV image editor.

3. Then I usually look for a large enough flat or almost flat area, surround it with seams and do an unwrap or a project from view. If it's distorted, I check where's the problem and usually separate it with seams, or just hide it. Then I pin the area I have, then I add some of the surrounding area, ostly the coplanar areas and do the unwrap, and if it's good then pin it and repeate until I cant add any more areas, and go to other parts of the mesh and do the same.

If you do this for a while, then you will develop an instinct of where to put the seams really. It helps if you think in reverse, like how would you build the model from paper.

3. Usually I don't bother scaling the islands until the end, the UV/average island size tool does the scaling fine.

4. Then I place the 2D cursor to one of the corners, or in the middle if I use the mirror UV option in the mirror modifier, and start to pack the islands. Since my cursor is in the right place, scaling everything around it keeps the relative sizes and I can pack the islands and rescale if I'm running out of space or having too much.

5. When the nap is ready, I bake in an AO to chevk for errors and overlaps, and if it's fine, I start working on the texture.

6. I usually try to plan a bit ahead for the LODs, and place the islands of parts that I know I will remove in a way that the geometry without them fits the same area. Like the heath sinks on the back of the ship for example.

Usually not coplanar quads, smooth and curvy areas and very thin geometry, especially if they are triangles which cause distortions. You can't usually avoid some distortion with curvy surfaces, but you can minimize them. Project from view usually helps if the angles aren't too steep. And pinning is your friend, but can screw up stuff when you removemthe wrong seam.

7. I do the LODs taking advantage of the bmesh features like ngons and vertex dissolving. Like this: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s12/sh/1bfe5da7-c485-42c1-8e36-830aafd3f9b2/cde95dc0934431792e2107649adc81e5

Basicly you can joun up faces into ngons, and all inner vertices will be removed, and you can dissolve any other unneded geometry trough the delete menu. And after getting rid of stuff you csn just triangulate with ctrl+t and then join tris to quads with F. alt j is useful too, but not always work. Other good tool is J: if you select two vertices, it will make an edge between them, and slice up ngons to quads quickly. You can only dissolve a vertex if it's on two ngon's boundary and has only two edges connecting to it. Also be careful deleting seam edges, but if you do it right, the seams most lkely will go to importand shapedefining edges most of the time.

Imwas able to make two lods in about two hours after I discovered this method, so I think it's pretty easy in practice 🙂 i was a bit skeptic about ngon support when it came to Blender, but it's a quite useful tool actually.

This way I don't really need to bake textures between lods, and they share UV space fine.

Hope this helps 🙂

Edit: here's a screencast I made to help NiankoSensei for doing the UV (but he managed to do it nicely without it :), but it wasn't playing for him. Let's check if it works for you. ( it works for me). It's unedited and a bit slow and hastly madr, but it might be useful. UV ing starts at about 4:00, but I was unable to finish it before I had to go to the bus.

For this big ship you use a texture 2048x2048 ?

I am reluctant to use big textures for my models, but we will see. So far this one looks pretty decent with 1024x1024.

When I was working on the Mirage, I have developed an extremely efficient way to recycle texture space. 

The basic idea is that you create a very generalized texture that can be mapped in many different ways, and create a few loops that can "warp" around the whole texture ( by switching off the UV constrain to image bounds). You can have a look at the texture I made for the ship I made earlier. It has a few features scattered around a flat area with some empty space between them. Than you can just keep recycling the texture by mapping your faces overlapping each other in different directions and scales. Combine that with ample use of Mirror, and I was achieving amazing fidelity with 512x512 or even 256x256 textures.

There are 2 downsides:

- it is only time efficient at low polygon counts, where you have the luxury of manually placing every quad of your UV map. 

- you have to be really careful about your ship markings map (custom hull colours), otherwise you will have bits of it all over the hull in a very random fashion.

As I understand it than is that there is no easy way to map a high poly model. It all takes time, witchever way you approach the problem. I will certainly have a look at the dissolve more closely, it looks like a very useful tool.

By the way, is there a setting to keep the UV map from shifting when you are manipulating the mesh? Like when you do a "loop cut and slide" you have an option to "correct UVs", so you can position your loop nicely without shifting the UV map. It would be very usefull if you could just map your low poly and then "lock" your UV map and than subdivide/ knife/extrude, what have you...

Now I didn't noticed that there's an option of UV correction for the edge slide. Thanks! 🙂

Unwrapping takes some time for sure, but it's not that bad in my opinion. I think people usually hate doing the UVs when they do it the first time so they try to avoid it as much as possible, so they don't really learn doing it fast and easy, but it's really not that hard if you get the hang of it. 

You can pin down stuff in the UV editor with P and unpin with alt+P. That's really for preserving the pinned layout when doing another unwrap.

The inset tool (i), loopcut (now that I know about that 😀 ) and the knife preserves the layout too so you just need to handle the UV of the new geometry, like the walls of an extruded/intruded part.

Slowly taking shape...

Looking pretty 🙂

Usually we don't put color on the diff texture, since there's a pattern system that allows for customizable color areas.

What's that text on the side?

When it comes to texture dimensions just use whatever feels appropriate but try and keep it towards the smaller size, i.e: whatever you feel you can get away with.

You don't need the same size textures for everything either, diffuse (colour) tends to be the biggest since it's got the most visual information in it, but specular and glow maps can be much smaller.

Looking pretty 🙂

Usually we don't put color on the diff texture, since there's a pattern system that allows for customizable color areas.

What's that text on the side?

Of course, I already had a look. I will format it properly to work with your system. I just made it red so that I can clearly see the pattern and any errors in the mapping.

lol, the text says: 

I made it so small that it is virtually unreadable, it is there just as a decor. That small decal on the side is meant to be a liquid hydrogen filling port, hence the LH2 sign right next to it. There is also a different one on the top with LOX and a similar warning mesage 😀

I can write down anything you want really.

On textures:

Yeah I generally go for the conservative sizes, maybe because I am old school now, and back when I was young I used to play games in 320x240 resolutions.

I found out that the glow map and the ship markings can often get away with 1/2 resolution of the diffuse.

Can you estimate the m³ of this ship ?

just for don't have all ships at the same value amphiesma is ~294m³ and natrix ~1248, if this ship is 2x natrix is to be near 2500-3000 m³

Its bigger than that. My 3d print is giving me over 7500 m3 total volume, so it is conceivable it could have over 3000 m3 cargo space. I am finalizing the model, I expect to finish it over the weekend...

That seems to be reasonable, it could even go up to 4000. Usually I put in some simple geometry for the cargo hold and propellant tanks to estimate their reasonable sizes.

I think those text could be smaller, but I have to see the finished model to be sure about it.

Looking forward seeing this ship ingame.

I have a problem. The model works fine in the model viewer, but when I want to start new game and test it out ingame the game crashes every time. I cannot find why this is happening. Here is the package of the ship, if anyone can find out why it is crashing the game...

WARNING!!! THIS PACKAGE BREAKS THE GAME!!

It shows up in the opening screen, and the Barnard's star start point works and you can fly it fine. The error isn't really at your side.

I experienced this error when I was playing around with ship stats. It's either the relatively low thrusts (which seem to be reasonable for the ship though) or the very short hyperspace range that screws with the game when the tradeships.lua tries to operate the ship. (The error disappeared when i removed the script).

I'm not sure which stat causes the hang. I tried dividing the masses by then, but it had no effect, then I multiplied the thrust, but it doesn't helped either. Dividing the masses with 100 did the job though. I'm starting to think it's about hyperspace ranges.

I'll report this bug, since now I'm not the only one experiencing it.

After some testing...

It seems that the ship's stats are just too high, or like you say, some value is going out of bounds. The model works fine if you calibrate the LUA (mass, cargo, thrust...) for something like 300 ton ship....

PS: I need some feedback from you:

 - do you like the model? I can change anything you think looks odd or want changing

- witch colour pattern do you prefer? I like the scratched worn one, but the clean one gives the ship a newer/refurbished look...

- do you think there is enough detail on the ship? When I realized the ship is supposed to be so big, I had a feeling that I should have caked on more detail on both the texture and the model itself....

It's quite nice overally. I like the worn out pattern. There are some small parts where you could easily get rid of some geometry, but nothing too over the top.

The thing that bothers me is the floating geometry of the RCS blocks, especially the front ones. They can be joined up at the cost of some 30-40 tris quite easily to give a much nicer mesh, and avoid any z-fighting flickering. I'm quite pedantic about avioiding floating geometry. 🙂 They don't waste much texel because they are quite small, but it's usually a good practice to have as few floating geometry as humanly possible.

The UV map is a bit generous in my opinion, and some UV sharing geometry isn't really reasonable. Like the base of the turret can easily have it's own area on the map.

I kinda likt the details, especially on the engines, I think I will integrate it to the other OPLI Barnard ships. There might be some more detail for sure, but I don't think it's really necessaryreally. Maybe some windows at the side for size indication, and some optics and other sensors for example.

I think we need to assemble a good collection of prefab detail like these, that can be used on the ship textures.

Ok I will look at the issues you pointed out. I never know what is the difference for when you have just floating geometry and joined up model, but I can easily bolean then onto the main mesh...

I will redo the turret base, that was a bit of a cheap trick, looks like you picked it up fast :D.

 speaking of prefab detail... something like this? 😀

I have made quite a collection for the Mirage

torham2234 Try this: nerodia.lua

This model is haughtiness, i prefer the scratch patern too . very good work

:O 13500 Tons weight ?

i think 2500 3000 are enought for this ship, good job on textures and model, i have to learn for 1 or 2 lives for make something like this.....

This lua for me work, is need to tune better exaust velocity

[attachment=2247:nerodia.lua.zip]

ops wrong angular thrust put it to 24e7

:O 13500 Tons weight ?

 

i think 2500 3000 are enought for this ship, good job on textures and model, i have to learn for 1 or 2 lives for make something like this.....

I only tried to make it as big as the concept designer (nozmajner) told me to. Actually even that number is somewhat shaved down, the total volume of the ship is 17500 m³    The ship is also pretty big, for a sense of scale, the landing gear moves out by exactly 2 meters. When landed, you can actually walk underneath the ship.

Here is an upgraded version with some windows, 2 optic navigation copulas and a small antenna...

Also I have merged all the meshes into single one, and managed to keep the polygon count, even with the extra objects.  Also rescaled some textures as it looks fine in lower resolution (glow map and specular)

I could easily scale down the model by 1/5. That would give more reasonable stats.