Author Topic: Need help with the textures UV mapping (of a 100% fan made 3d model)  (Read 3628 times)

Nero

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Hello everyone. Though I am relatively new in the world of 3d model convention I’m working really hard and I believe I am doing the best I can so far. However my knowledge is limited on the instructions of the tutorials posted on this forum and I have recently stumbled upon a problem. Until now when I was converting a model that had more than one texture (Usually 2 the most) I wasn’t messing with the textures, instead I was exporting as separate the parts that were combining more than one texture and then I was combining them as one on Pcreator adding them as group. Now this method worked for me well so far, but now I started working on a model that has 14 different texture files. So it’s quite obviously that the previous method I used won’t really help me here and my only option is to combine some of these textures on a bigger one. Now I see that there is a method of how to do this on Squeebles tutorial where you combining the textures in one on photoshop and then you fix the UVs manually on 3dsmax by converting your model to editable poly selecting every piece of it separately go to the Unwrap UVW's and move and resize the polygons (?) over the texture until you recreate this way the entirely UV map. I did tried that method but since I have to reposition the UVs manually by myself the finishing result is way inferior to the original UV mappings and the textures doesn’t look so good on the model wile their details are in many cases messed up. So I kind of lost hope here and I was wondering if anyone knows of some other way that could possibly give better results and maybe won’t include to repositioning the UVs by moving them with the mouse which gives so bad results. The program I use is 3dsmax but I have also installed blender and milkshape though I don’t really know how to use them yet but if your method includes some other program that I haven’t mention above, I would still be grateful to hear it. I don’t really mind if your method will need the combining use of 3, 4 even100 different programs as long as it could give me a decent result.
Thank you very much for you time and patience in reading this.
Nero

P/S I also feel obligated to mention due to the new rules of the forum that the parts that I want their UV coordinates fixed belong to 100% fan made sword made for “Jedi Knight”, which’s free distribution has been allowed by it’s creator and can be obtained by anyone at the relative site for free, and not to a model that is a legal property of Square-Enix or any other company and I also assure that whatever I will create from this will be for my personal use only and is not mend to be published.
I hope that this post or any part of it is not coming in collision with the forum’s rules as what it actually requests is instructions for the use of a 3d graphics creating program and has nothing to do whatsoever with ripping 3d models from another game. But if it does please contact me and I will immediately remove it or rewrite the specific part.
« Last Edit: 2009-08-02 03:27:03 by Nero »

Millenia

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Nope, you have to reposition them by hand. It's not really all THAT hard, just takes a little bit of effort. I managed to squeeze 4 of my swords for Cloud into one texture without any quality loss.

BTW: You don't need to put the ones that say _spec, _enviro or anything like that in there, they're specular and reflection maps - neither of which the FF7 engine can utilize. Just use the ones without any suffixes.

Nero

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I see, thanks Millenia. :-)
Now I was wandering if anyone has ever managed to put more than 10 texture files to a single battle model? I mean Pcreator can set the number of textures of battle models to whatever number we want, it’s just the game that reads as textures only the files from **ac to **al, but theoretically that could be altered like in the field models, though there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to open the battle models settings. Ok now I’m not much of a programmer to be sure of if what I say has any logical base at all but it just seems to be possible.