Flatiron - automatic unwrapping / baking

[thatTESguy]

http://www.texturebaking.com/features-benefits/

 

Just tried this thing. Oh god, it's amazing.

 

Using part of a model and end up with an absurdly low texture coverage, like this?

 

 

Load model, click a few buttons, and turn that into this in 5 minutes

 

 

with all textures (diffuse, normals, speculars) intact. Export it back to nif, and you just cut your texture space by 1/4 (or 1/16) while preserving 100% detail.

 

Of course the default seams are a bit ugly, but as it produces seamless output anyways, that doesn't really matter if your texture is final anyways.

 

Quite spendy $$$, but I haven't seen any tool that can do this, this quickly. Going to look for this thing to go on sale (the trial has about a 1024x1024 texture size limit), which really is good enough for most of this "shrinkage" stuff that you'd do. Of course, the tool can also be used in the conventional way (i.e. baking multiple textures into one); the use above is definitely unconventional.

[canderes]

I usually just detach the part of the mesh that I want to redo the UV's on and cut the required parts of the image off of the original texture and scale up. The only complaint I have is that if the image is low res it looks ugly, but at least it has no seam problems.  If you have trouble with overlapping/offset image you can probably use viewport canvas with a soft brush to paint over the seams. By the way were you able to use bones pro?