Help UV unwrapping a complex model

Garry's Mod modelling
#1

Hey all so this is the first time I have actually made something decent in Blender and its the first time I have rigged and animated a model in blender. I’m having a little trouble with the output of the UV Unwrapping. I have tried all of the unwrap methods available in Blender and so far the Smart UV Project gives me the best results.

Here is the UV layout in Blender:

https://i.imgur.com/XVNBb6W.png[/t]

And here is the result exported and viewed in PhotoShop:
[t]https://i.imgur.com/yxXFNbN.png

The “solid” black block on the right of the image and the smaller one near the top center are the faces for the barrels of both guns. I’m more concerned with whether or not the fact that its solid in PhotoShop is going to cause any problems with texturing since I cant zoom in an fill in each barrel’s face.

If its not a problem then great! But I’m also wondering if theres a better way I can unwrap this model and generate a better UV map.

#2

welp, that is a problem, unless you want the barrels to be a solid color, if they’re too small you’ll find it difficult (in this case impossible) to give it a good texture, I suggest to redo but make space for bigger barrels.

#3

The friend who asked me to make it actually wanted less polys so after using Limit Dissolve I managed to get the poly count down considerably and I think I might just end up using a separate UV for the 2 guns. I’m curious to know how this would work with a higher poly model like a character (ie one from HL2) where the face alone probably has more polygons than my entire model.

#4

You could have just UV unwrapped only the barrels by creating a large seam that went through the side edges of them. Additionaly you could have made one barrel and duplicate it once your texturing was done.

#5

I’m still really new to modelling so I’m not sure what you mean exactly. I know how to mark seams though.

#6

I think he meant overlapping the multiple barrel Uv’s, since they are the same it would also help making them look the same, also, you’d be surprised how many poligons hl2 characters use, it’s actually very few and make them look better with normal/occlusion maps and good textures.

#7

Here is an example with a simple barrel like shape, all of them share the same UVs. You only ought to do one of them and unwrap it, then texture it and finally duplicate it to suit your model. You can reunwrap a mesh by simply selecting it and reunwrapping it, without selecting the rest of the object so you can keep the UVs from the other meshes intact.

https://preview.ibb.co/m0ubOa/1.png

You can see how you only need a seam along one of the edges on the side face, you also need to seam the top and bottom faces if any. In mine came a bit crooked but this is easily fixable.

#8

I’m a little confused as to how the UV map is applied to the mesh, but I managed to get something working. I unwrapped one of the entire guns (a little pointless since all of the barrels should be the same) and made a texture for it then just added a diffuse material to both guns with the same image texture.

I’ve exported it to Garry’s Mod using Crowbar but I’m having some weird Z issues with the gun on the left side.

1056×401 48.2 KB

That gun was cloned from the opposite side and scaled on the Y-axis by -1 so I’m thinking that might have something to do with it. Any ideas?

#9

Your nomrals are inverted, try going back to blender and select all the faces then press recalculate under de normasl tab on the left side menu on edit mode

#10

Thank you so much for your help. It looks awesome :D. The only thing left is to figure out why Source Engine Export is warning me about multiple armatures.

All of my objects have the armature modifier and I have also parented them to bones on that armature because I was having a lot (like really… a lot) of problems trying to get the objects to be positioned correctly without it. In object/pose mode they would be in the wrong position/rotation but in edit mode they were fine. The origin of the objects was correct in all modes but the mesh wasnt.