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UV Unwrap question

pks1414

pks1414

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406
I've finally cracked most of the things I need to know, however I'm wondering if anyone has a best practice for UV Unwrapping. There are quite a few faces on the unwrap and I'm trying to get sufficient gaps between the unwrapped faces so there is little or no bleed. I use Smart UV Unwrap and play about with stuff in there. Also tried tick the constrain to image and pack islands but as you cab see from the screenshot, a lot of stuff is really close so when I do the AO it can come out a bit messy. Any ideas? I thought about trying to unwrap individual parts then move them on to the map?
 

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pks1414 said:
I've finally cracked most of the things I need to know, however I'm wondering if anyone has a best practice for UV Unwrapping. There are quite a few faces on the unwrap and I'm trying to get sufficient gaps between the unwrapped faces so there is little or no bleed. I use Smart UV Unwrap and play about with stuff in there. Also tried tick the constrain to image and pack islands but as you cab see from the screenshot, a lot of stuff is really close so when I do the AO it can come out a bit messy. Any ideas? I thought about trying to unwrap individual parts then move them on to the map?
Click to expand...
Just change the margin value under Pack islands menu.
 
Thanks for that, I did as you suggested and it worked however everything is still mighty close, I followed the @spotlope tutorial and did achieve a fairly acceptable AO Bake, however all of the textures are on one sheet and I have created some nice textures for the various parts of the hanger using Materialize. I'm now wondering whether to split the hanger up into individual parts, Walls, Roof, etc and then do the AO Bake on them, they will fit nicely them with each having its own UVUnwrap and AO Bake. This does beg the question though that with Blender 2.9 and MSFS2020, is the AO Bake method still relevant in the tutorial I followed?
 
pks1414 said:
I've finally cracked most of the things I need to know, however I'm wondering if anyone has a best practice for UV Unwrapping. There are quite a few faces on the unwrap and I'm trying to get sufficient gaps between the unwrapped faces so there is little or no bleed. I use Smart UV Unwrap and play about with stuff in there. Also tried tick the constrain to image and pack islands but as you cab see from the screenshot, a lot of stuff is really close so when I do the AO it can come out a bit messy. Any ideas? I thought about trying to unwrap individual parts then move them on to the map?
Click to expand...
I project from view in an ortho view and then arrange the islands in a manner that makes sense if I am going to create the texture in a paint program like photshop, gimp or what ever. that way i can bake an AO and then layout everything so it makes sense. In the paint program I can then easily add linear features like gutters etc. here is my example

Screenshot (257)sm.png
 
May I ask for what actually the AO Bake is good for? I thought it just is the "lighting" and shadows, but wouldn't those actually are calculated in time in MSFS?
 
@Av8rThor thanks for getting back to me, how do you use an ortho view? I did do an initial unwrap and back and messed about with pack islands but it was still difficult to identify things like guttering.
 
I just click on the balls sticking to either side of the gismo in the upper corner. Technically it is a plan view (architectural) not orthographic. As you can see in the picture my gutters and posts are all laid out easy to color.. In answer to the Other question...
AO ambient occlusion helps define corners and joints. Shadows should be left to the game engine, however there are some it won’t do. I bake my maps for ao with a plane showing below the building but not selected. Add that little bit of dark at the bottom of the wall.
 
karlo922 said:
May I ask for what actually the AO Bake is good for? I thought it just is the "lighting" and shadows, but wouldn't those actually are calculated in time in MSFS?
Click to expand...
It is used as the Red channel in the Comp texture. It helps to accentuate the model.
 
pks1414 said:
@Av8rThor thanks for getting back to me, how do you use an ortho view? I did do an initial unwrap and back and messed about with pack islands but it was still difficult to identify things like guttering.
Click to expand...
As long as your unwrap is good without any overlapping faces you can have a good AO baking. Maybe try using the textools for all your baking. https://blender-addons.org/textools-addon/
But I use Substance Painter for all my baking but it also requires some tweaking sometimes. But the number one issue is overlapping faces on the UVs.
 
Devinci said:
As long as your unwrap is good without any overlapping faces you can have a good AO baking. Maybe try using the textools for all your baking. https://blender-addons.org/textools-addon/
But I use Substance Painter for all my baking but it also requires some tweaking sometimes. But the number one issue is overlapping faces on the UVs.
Click to expand...
That is why i customize my unwrapping and order it so it makes sense when i am out of blender. a white sheet with crazy lines all over the place would not make sense for my texture painting and i ma not about to plunk down more cash for substance. :) My next effort will be doing a hanger all in pbr within Blender so i can nail that work flow down. Build, render, bake, texture slot export thing
 
@Av8rThor That's what I've been trying to figure out. I've got a nice AO map baked on to the model but I now need to figure out how I use the PBR textures for the various parts of the Model? I have separate textures for things like the roof, walls, hanger doors etc. So I'm struggling to get my head around combining these (I now know, I think) where they fit into the MSFS properties in Blender and how this works with Bill Womacks method of applying textures using the AO map that Blender created?

Does that make sense, by the way I use Materialize to create the Maps needed for PBR and how to use the RBG channel, all thanks to the good folks on here
 
Okay, I finally got PBR textured monkeyhead in a box. I used extreme pbr to assign the materials. money head is one material, box is two materials, one from the monkey head. This was werd for me to figure out. after I made the model and then assigned the materials (using materialize to make my rgb channel holding the metal ao (built by materialize) and roughness though the mdfs standard properties menu. never open up a uv. I exported the model and moved the three (actaully six, three for each material) into the textures folder and built the package. it seems to me i have eitehr the PBR route using tileable textures or the uv route of baking and painting in between the lines. This looks find for secondary building in the distance but not so much up close. I have built a hanger with pbr and once i figure out how to paint dirt oto the pbr with mask painter i will pout that into the sim. If all works as expected I will remodel my office in pbr. Big drawback is, texture wraps werd even on squared (4 vertices) sometimes and it take many faces for doors windows etc. then i am at a complete loss on how to do an emission texture in pbr for night.. here is the monkey head in a box next to msfs hardware

Screenshot (270).png


and here next to the building I made using uv's

Screenshot (268).png

the drawback is no amniant occlusion.... yet. It does look way more legit though.
 
You have a preference? the PBR on the right do look good, especially the corrugated iron. To be honest I haven't even got as far as exporting into MSFS I've been trying to get my head around all of this
 
pks1414 said:
You have a preference? the PBR on the right do look good, especially the corrugated iron. To be honest I haven't even got as far as exporting into MSFS I've been trying to get my head around all of this
Click to expand...
What do you want to know.? Export a box first. Just use the standard box and using the blemder2msfs tool. Assign a texture that you make. Call it blue and in an art program make a 512x512 blue square. In blender I’ve unwraup that box. In the Uber menu on the left open the picture you made to fit in map to that picture. When done on the properties menu on the right, select mags properties standar. In the for albedo texture, select the one you made. Export settings.. I won’t go into that here but there things ar w Dri tack. File name at the bottom of export window should match name in the export menu. Select crest guid and above that ../texture/ so it knows where that blue square is you made and linked in the properties menu. Folder wise in “your project” project sources. Model library goes the file you are saving and in a sunflower called texture goes the blue square. .. enough for now dentist thing... lol does any of what I said makes sense?
 
Sorry I wasn't very clear, I actually was interested how you went about applying your textures to the model. I've created various textures using photoshop and Materialize, my Hanger is actually split into 3, Hanger, Gutter and Roof. The Roof and Gutter only have one texture to apply however the body of the hanger is made up of about 5 textures. You can see from the start of the thread what it looks like. My plan is to say, select the Roof, create a material called roof and have the roof texture below that, that's the simple one, the hanger however, I need to create 5 Material slots, Doors, walls, old bricks etc and have the materials below them. plus all of the PBS textures

I then went into shader mode did UV unwraps and applied like that

Sorry if that sounds muddled but I couldn't think how to explain, I would be interested to know how you did it
 
Well if you scroll up and look at my two drawings what I did was put the UV outline as a layer in my art program and then put the textures into the correct place based on the UV layout. And then save that as officetexture.PNG that texture includes everything the building the roof the walls the windows the door the windows. Then in the tool I link office texture to the file and office texture a missive to the file and office texture normal to the file. Then exported
 
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