The navigator’s station is now completely unwrapped. In other words, every surface, every individual polygon, has been flattened and transposed onto this flat map:



As mentioned in the last article, I make a temporary PNG texture which is a colourful grid. Each square measures 32x32 pixels. This helps to organise dense, neat arrangements of components, maximising space; to relate UV co-ordinates to pixel positions in Photoshop; and to see at a glance how much texture detail each component will have.

Large, plain surfaces don’t need high resolution. The lighting rig for baking is deliberately diffuse, giving very soft shadows, and the resolution can be as little as 32 pixels per 100mm. It’s not fixed: areas with raised detail, or more objects casting sharper shadows, will get slightly more. These variations are shown below.



The highest resolution is 3 pixels per mm, which is only when graphics and text requires a high degree of clarity. It’s become less frequent since I started using polytext, but manufacturers printed labels are a good example.



Next step: Baking.

--
GMM-P (06/02/2011)

Tags: Textures