Hello everyone,
I apologize if this is a rudimentary question, or if it has been answered here before (I checked most threads for this), but this is driving me *-crazy-* and I needed to know if there's an easy way to resolve this.
I have finally undertaken the task of not just using seamless textures with a standard UVW Box Map, but 3DS's more precise UV Unwrap modifier to hopefully achieve for more precise (and crisp) results.
My problem, simply put is that the UV Unwrap modifier seems to be inconsistent with how it scales it's 0-1 UV canvas, per object, and I would like (if possible) to increase the map density while keeping the mesh within the confines of the UV canvas so that I can effectively output a UV canvas to Photoshop for some texture fitting. Allow me to give you an example that has had me scratching my head all day.
As you can see below, I successfully unwrapped a simple timber column and was able to composite a wonderful Photoshop texture right back on to it with stunning resolution (I actually got giddy doing this- especially since the rendering times were significantly shorter than my usual composite map renders!):
I then questioned if my map was too small as I had an overkill 2K map on a single object vs. a 4k map on several objects. After watching a few videos on the subject, I discovered a handy little plugin called "TexTools" to view my UV scale (as a checkerboard) to gain a sense of the UV scale for my object, and what I got was surprising:
It seems the density of each object is significantly lower-- likely because there are more objects to cover in the same UV canvas. Despite what I learned from other videos no matter how I packed my UV's or AI upscaled my Diffuse map from Photoshop (I stopped at 8K with similar results), the only thing that reduced the density of my UV's was to overscale the mesh outside of the 0-1 UV canvas, but then you need to rework your UV Template as the meshes have moved (EDIT: you can't render the UV Template as nothing is within the 0-1 space..).
So to summarize, is there a way to increase the relative scale of UV intensity within this canvas, or am I best to work on a smaller set of objects, as with the column above and bake them all down at a later stage?
Please pardon me if this is a rudimentary question, I am quite new to unwrapping but find the results highly rewarding and want to improve my craft as a arch. visualizer. 🙂
Thank you all in advance for your help with this, and sorry to.. "wrap" you up in this- I am hoping it's a relatively simple (for 3DS standards) fix!
Cory, the apologetic.
