Need help with my armor mesh/UV map

[Toastbre4d]

Hi there!

I really wanted to make my own armor mod and started meshing. I think I'm done with the _0 mesh now, so I want to make a texture for it. I need to export a uv map now, and for the boots and body it worked fine, but the plate armor is giving me grief. I think I put seams everywhere I thought there needed to be one, but Blender still spits out something unusable and badly fractured (stray polygons, stretched, etc.).

Because this is the first time I'm doing this kind of thing, I'd like someone more skilled than me to take a look at my mesh. I'm at my wits end, I know I need to put seams so the algorithm knows what belongs where, but I just fiddled with it for 3 hours to no avail.

Any help is appreciated, but don't just tell me "You need to put seams!", I knew that already. The best thing would be that someone who made armor from scratch before fixes my uv map problem, I'd be on my merry way texturing and CreationKitting then.

If you want the files so you can look at them, leave me a message.

Thanks in advance.

LG, Toastbre4d

[DixiePig]

Sure, I'll take a look at it. PM me the .blend.

[Toastbre4d]

I scrapped the original armor plating and redid it from scratch, it went much faster this time due to the experience I gained doing this, it also looks much better. I'll be done with the plating in a few hours, if you still want to take a peek I'll send it to you.

LG, Toastbre4d

[DixiePig]

Sure, send it over whenever you're ready.

[DixiePig]

okay, I got your pm and there are a couple of things I want to talk about. Do you want me to post about it here (I think it may be useful for other modders) or would you prefer it in a pm?

 

I like your design.

[Toastbre4d]

If it is just related to my design, I'd prefer it in a PM, but if others can benefit from your advice, go ahead and post it here. I'm thinking general meshing advice and stuff like that.

LG, Toastbre4d

[DixiePig]

Okay. As I said, I think your design looks good. There are a number of things going on here and they're just about all technical things.

First off, I should say that I personally work with the latest build of Blender. There are a lot of advantages to doing it that way but the main one is that keeping your skills relevant lets you branch out from just modding to all kinds of other things that blender supports, and you'll find it useful in many areas of life.

 

Blender 2.49 has it's advantages too, of course. So, sorry if I instruct you to use some feature it doesn't support.

 

I think for UV unwrapping the first, most useful thing is to use a UV grid texture. You can turn on textures in the viewpot under the shading options in the viewport tabs. When you create a new texture in the UV/image editor there's an option to make it a UV grid. Select all faces in edit mode, then select the image in the UV/image editor to have it show up in the viewport.

 

 

 

The UV grid gives you clear visual cues on pixel density and distortion. As you can see the legs look great, the gloves look broken, and there's something wrong in the shoulder pads. The back needs to be completely reworked. Also, the pixel density is inconsistent between different parts (larger/smaller squares). I find it easiest to unwrap each part individually, join them all together to get the UV scale consistent and have them all occupy the same texture, then split them up again.

 

Gloves/hands are some of the trickiest things to unwrap. For this kind of thing I find it very useful to look up clothing patterns. Here's how I'd do it:

 

 

Separating the fingers felt like a weird choice that would create a lot of seams, but it seems to be the only way to do it without having a LOT of distortion.

 

 

That black line down the length of the legs is caused by inconsistent normals, see how some are pointing inwards? Recalculate normals to fix this. Internal faces also make it look like this so watch out for that too.

 

the mesh you sent me had all it's shading flat. The .nif format supports flat shading but bethesda studios shade everything smooth and use something like an edgesplit modifier to mark out sharp edges. I suspect that smooth shading is better for performance. Your legs, shoes and shirt should definitely be shaded smooth. Your armor plates look fine with flat shading but you might consider using sharp edges with them like the left thigh armor here:

 

 

I noticed that the triangle count becomes very dense for the heels of the shoes. Generally you want consistent triangle density except on detailed areas of importance like faces. But hey, who says shoes can't be areas of importance, especially high heels.

 

lastly, I think that you should add thickness to the border of the shirt like you have with the gloves. Skyrim doesn't render the backs of faces so having no thickness can kill a mesh's believability. One case where you would keep it like this would be if you were giving it a lacy border using transparency in your texture.

 

I hope that's helpful.

 

[Toastbre4d]

That's very helpful, thanks!

I think I fixed the back of the armor plating by changing around some seams, the two plates are now completely selectable as islands on the UV editor as opposed to being comprised of single faces. I'll see if the problem persists though. I don't think it's the meshes fault, I suspect Blender 2.49's UV unwrapper to be the culprit.

Those normals definitely need fixing, thanks for the heads up. I'm a total noob at this, so I didn't notice.

I know that it kills believability if there is no thickness, but I think there is a shader flag you can set in Nifskope that puts the texture on both sides of the mesh so it isn't invisible if viewed from the back. If that doesn't help, adding that border can't be too hard, I'm just a little worried about clipping with BBP/HDT animations. I was going to use transparency with that shirt anyway.

As a total Blender noob I couldn't be bothered to make decent looking shoes from scratch, so I pulled those off of Blendswap (Creative Commons, no worries) and modified them to my liking, hence the high polycount in the heels. I think it looks decent, and as long as there aren't any problems with it (other than performance on low end machines, a few hundred faces aren't going to kill my GTX770), I'm not going to change it.

I didn't know smooth shading was used by Bethesda. Will use that.

Next step is probably going to be "Modding Skyrim II: Pulling my hair out even more", as I need to make a bunch of textures (I know how to do that, thank whatever higher entity you believe in) and work with NifSkope *shudder*...

LG, Toastbre4d