Upgraded UV Mapper overview.

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Upgraded UV Mapper overview.

Post by Oleg »

The stitch tool in UV Mapper.

The recently released ZModeler 3.0.5 has an upgraded UV mapper that extends usage of mapping charts, whether they are parametric or not. The newly-introduced Stitchtool in toolbox is a short-cut to "Attach" tool, and allows to stitch charts that share edges. For simplicity, when you hover the chart, the neighbor charts will show red lines on shared edges:
Image
Thus you can see whether certain chart could be stitched to something and where exactly ZModeler will stitch it. The same "shared edges" highlight is available on vertices level, so you can determine the exact point-to-point match before stitch, or use it for any other purpose:
Image

Among the changes of handling charts, the key difference is introduced - each chart point can control mapping on several points of destination polygonal mesh. If certain mesh has a lot of seams and all sliced to produce sharp edges (for example, on beveled corners), the continuous mesh surface option will allow to ignore these seams and edit mapping like there are no seams at all.

All these benefits are shown in the following video guide. It introduces the "Unwrap" method of creating UV mapping and shows the overal workflow on creating mapping.

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The Render to Texture tool.

The second upgrade key-point is the Render to Texture tool in UV Mapper toolbox. This tool can render UV atlas, render world-space normals or create bump-map given an previously-rendered normal map. And the main point you should certainly check is the Ambient Occlusion render.

The tool has a dozen of settings to play with, so the all-in-one video guide was made to show the workflow and settings. As an example, the side-skirt of ETS2 truck was used. Then the object was unwrapped and finally, the ambient-occlusion map was rendered for unwrapped UV charts. An entire texture was saved and applied as diffuse-color map, so rendered AO shadows appear on a model.

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The mod was packed and tested in-game, so you will see the changes in mod quality while watching the guide.