Best way to map cars

Discussion in 'Modding' started by hamiltonfan2205, Nov 5, 2016.

  1. hamiltonfan2205

    hamiltonfan2205 Registered

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    Over the years I've been using ZModeler to map cars but it takes a while when you have to select faces one by one.

    I just want to ask, what is the quickest and easiest way to map cars using free software?
     
  2. Coutie

    Coutie Moderator Staff Member

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    That's how you do it. Best results won't come from some software that does it for you. Probably not the answer you wanted to hear, but if you do uvw mapping enough you'll get to a point where you can get it done pretty fast. Cars you can do pretty quickly because you usually only have to map one side, then you can just mirror the side you've finished and the other side is done, but you would've needed to plan that out before hand.
     
  3. hamiltonfan2205

    hamiltonfan2205 Registered

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    The only issue I have is selecting the faces. Is there any tool that can select faces fast and map quickly and easily? With blender it is hard to select.

     
  4. Coutie

    Coutie Moderator Staff Member

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    Oh, I don't know anything about blender. I imagine there would be some way to do that, or else I doubt it would be as popular as it is.
     
  5. hamiltonfan2205

    hamiltonfan2205 Registered

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    How do you mirror the side you've finished?

     
  6. Coutie

    Coutie Moderator Staff Member

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    Well, you would only model one side, then mirror that. But in max, you can copy and paste in the unwrap uvw window, so maybe you can do that in blender too.
     
  7. hamiltonfan2205

    hamiltonfan2205 Registered

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    The trouble with selecting parts is its easy to miss lots of faces. And if I do that, you can't just add them to the mapping, it takes a lot of work to put them in position in conjunction with the rest of the mapping. Any help?
     
  8. Coutie

    Coutie Moderator Staff Member

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    Well, if you don't re-size everything until it's finished, it shouldn't be too hard to fix that. With 3ds max, you can just stitch the edges, or you can just turn vertex snapping on and drag the face into place. I don't know if blender has it, but max has a select element selection, where it selects all faces of said element. Also, you should see if it there is an option for shaded faces, in max they turn red when selected, so you can easily see if you've missed something.
     
  9. hamiltonfan2205

    hamiltonfan2205 Registered

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    I don't have 3d studio max

     
  10. Coutie

    Coutie Moderator Staff Member

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    I know. Like I said before, I don't know about blender, so I'm saying see if it has the same features I'm talking about.
     
  11. T1specialist

    T1specialist Registered

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    Well in blender there are many techniques to map an object. A lot of it is just the basic stuff, like holding ALT while clicking face edge to select all faces next to each other, selecting something and then pressing ctrl and + to increase the selection. You can also go into wireframe mode while having face-select on and use the selecting blob tool (c button) or the rectangle select tool (b button) and select what you need. That way it is easier to select objects with single click.

    Then hold shift and select more. Also add seams to the object which are super useful for parts which you uvmap using the automatic unwrap tool. Then when you make lods you probably want to keep those seams intact so it takes some knowledge to place them in correct places. Of course you want the seams away from line of sight. On car body placing the seams can be tricky because of the curvature. You want the car body to be uniformal so that if you draw a straight line the line on the car body will be straight too. To get this you can do something like using the unwrap and then use a texture for the car body material with lots of squares and then just manually adjust it until it is uniform everywhere.

    For example: https://cdn.tutsplus.com/cg/uploads/2013/07/Willy_UVMapping_PT5_R__48.jpg
    The sizes of the squares are pretty equal everywhere which is what you want for a skin.

    You can also select a face and then press shift-7 (7 on the numpad) to get a straight view of the face if you want to use the uvmap project from view. And sometimes you don't even need to fill a texture with the uvmaps if you are going to use tiled texture. But if not then you want to also focus on minimizing unused space. The less unused space you have the more more accurately smaller texture can be drawn on the mesh. If you have multiple same objects you can use ctrl-L to copy uvmaps from one to other

    Other key thing with uvmapping is the materials. From uvmapping point of view one uvmap is one texture. But one texture can be many uvmaps. This is more complicated in rf2 because you need several uvmaps. And if you use a shader with both tiled and centered uvmaps and textures you need to know which uvmaps need to be certain size.

    As for mirroring in blender. You can use the mirror modifier. You don't need apply the modifiers when exporting from blender to rf2 because you can choose to apply the modifiers on export

    And there are tons of tutorials about uvmapping on youtube. There are probably 20 at least 1000 videos about how to do basic uvmapping. Uvmapping is kinda tedious work and does take lots of time.
     

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