UV Mapping for level design
Hi everyone! I'm stuck on something that a lot of googling hasn't really helped me with...
I'm working on a level in Blender. I want to find a better way of mapping UV coordinates to walls and other "basic" elements. Right now, I do a planer projection/unwrap for each one, but it feels very slow and tedious.
"real" level editors seem to take care of a lot of that. Take this image for example:
This is from UDK. From what I've seen, editors like UDK and Hammer automatically do a planar projection, or use world coordinate for the UVs, or something. You just assign a tiling texture to the region and that's it. It feels like it's a way more intuitive way of doing it.
Anyways, to try to speed things up, I made a couple common pieces that make up the level and instance them to block things out. The thing is, textures don't quite tile right across some pieces, because they aren't all square.
Can I do something like level editors do? Use world coordinates for my UVs? So if a poly was on some x,y,z of the grid, the UV mapping would correspond to the same position?
Is there a better way? This is my first time trying this :P
Thanks!
I'm working on a level in Blender. I want to find a better way of mapping UV coordinates to walls and other "basic" elements. Right now, I do a planer projection/unwrap for each one, but it feels very slow and tedious.
"real" level editors seem to take care of a lot of that. Take this image for example:
This is from UDK. From what I've seen, editors like UDK and Hammer automatically do a planar projection, or use world coordinate for the UVs, or something. You just assign a tiling texture to the region and that's it. It feels like it's a way more intuitive way of doing it.
Anyways, to try to speed things up, I made a couple common pieces that make up the level and instance them to block things out. The thing is, textures don't quite tile right across some pieces, because they aren't all square.
Can I do something like level editors do? Use world coordinates for my UVs? So if a poly was on some x,y,z of the grid, the UV mapping would correspond to the same position?
Is there a better way? This is my first time trying this :P
Thanks!
Replies
the approach with modular pieces you got there is generaly accepted to be the way to go
uv mapping is tediouse but its also where good env artists and great ones seperate. ...that doesnt real translate from german^^
What you try is using modular pieces to build up an environment. That is very common and a good solution. Normally, every modular piece has a UV-mapped texture that tiles in every direction necessary. For example, if you want to combine several wall-pieces for a longer wall, the texture has to tile in x-direction. It doesn't matter if your pieces are not sqaure, just create a UV-mapped texture that tiles in the right places.
Therefore, you won't have any texture seams, when you do this, but every piece has the same texture. (But there are solutions for that as well, if its going to be a problem...)
When I understand you right, you want to let blender assign/map a tiling texture to several pieces at once so that not every piece has the same texture. I am working with blender myself and I have never heard of anything like that before. If your pieces are more or less planar, you could try something with projection, but I don't have any real idea how that could work in detail.
Have you tried to ask over at blenderartists.org? Maybe someone can help you there...