Competition #10 - Godo

[Godo]

Hello all!

Here is my WIP for the Ultimate Pickup competition. I am quite new at modeling, so any and all input will be appreciated!

The concept here is a magic pickup for a fantasy game. Originally I conceived of a kind of fire spirit or djinni that you could grab and it would do it's firery work for you, but that was leaning in the direction of more of a weapon, and not a pickup. So I thought, "What if you could feed the elemental creature, or your own magic meter by gathering elemental runes?" So I went with the concept of a fire rune that would augment your fire magic damage. I wanted it to be easily readable from a distance, so the player could spot it, instantly know what it was, and make a bee-line for it.

Here is the concept:


The smooth shaded model WIP:


The wire frame:


Right now it's at 1034 tris.

Please please PLEASE - any possible problems you see now, or foresee for the future, please let me know. Crits are welcome.

[Godo]

I'm using Maya and some of those littler stones are simply duplicates that have been rotated. Obviously, I'd like them to share UVs. How can I do that? I tried copy and pasting the UVs, but that didn't work.

[myles]

Hey,
Just simply move the UVs over the top of the other ones, thats what i do.

[Godo]

Ok - I get that. What I want to do is copy stone A's UVs and pick stone B and say "Paste A's UV set here and have this instance be the UV set for B's stone."

[TychoCelchuuu]

Typically the way you'd do that is to UV map stone A and then duplicate it to create stone B. There's also a "transfer UVs" command that ought to do it.

[DooFi]

why would you want them to share UVs anyway, you have 1024x1024pixels, that should be plenty for each stone. Especially given their size. Nobody will care for small seams, i guess.

[Godo]

UV finished. Any input would be appreciated.

[andrei313]

It looks like you didn't share any UV space. I can see that the bottom left one is symmetrical and it's big too.. you could free a lot of space just by flipping it and placing it on top of the other. And you could do the same for the rest. You unwrap one stone and then you copy it around the big one so you don't have to place the UVs on top of each other and worry about seams if they are unique. With a little rotation no one will notice With 3 variations of the little ones and let's say 2 for the medium ones you can double the resolution you have now.
And one question: what are those 6 planes? I can see only one in your model?

[Godo]

Ok. Updated the UVs to maximize sharing. If I didn't quite get what you were suggesting, plz let me know. This is my first time UVing - but I'm itching to get to texturing. I also am posting an updated wire to show what those other planes are: one is a base where the cracks in the earth appear, the other is the glow coming from the earth and the rectangular ones are where little bits of dust and things will be dropping off the floating stones.

[andrei313]

You have a lot more space now to make everything more detailed. I hope you won't have problems with the seems though cause the peaces don't fit together quite well. The best way to learn things is to practice so start texturing and if you find any problems you'll be able to avoid them next time, or this time cause it's usually easy to change UVs or even the model while you're texturing. From my experience I can say that understanding good UVs comes after you texture what you just unwrapped