Next-Gen Weapon Creation – Day 3: Unwrapping and Texture Baking

on Aug 18th 2009 with 26 comments
Tutorial Details
This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Next-Gen Weapon Creation

Creating weaponry effectively in a next-gen workflow requires detailed knowledge of a variety of very specific skills and tools. In the third tutorial of this knife creation series, we will examine UV mapping and baking, two highly complementary sciences.

By effectively taking advantage of smoothing groups and island breaks on the UV map, as well as a baking method known as the exploded bake, we circumvent many of the pitfalls that plague those new to the baking process. The final result will be normal and occlusion maps that are generated as quickly and painlessly as possible, and a that is mesh completely ready for texturing.

Please note that, although we will be using 3ds Max, the theories and techniques discussed here can be applied to any 3d application that supports unwrapping and texture baking.

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Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

Ben Bolton is a freelance game artist and student from New Hampshire. He has four years experience with weapon and environment modeling, and has contributed to several Source engine mods. He is currently attending Champlain College in the Game Art and Animation program. You can view his portfolio website at: www.benbolton.com.  

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  • Hooper

    Waited for this one. Thanx for the video!

  • Rob

    Fantastic work! hope to see more from you soon :D

  • http://www.overlutz.be Benoit

    Great job! I learned some things. Thanks.

  • Hooper

    I learned a few UVW unwrap tip as well.

    tip:
    When you were doing those inside polygons for the holes and were moving them and aligning them on top of each other –once they were flat ….just use copy and paste to perfectly stick them on top of each other.

  • http://www.martinszeme.com Martins Zeme

    Hmm, one thing that bugged me is why would you break up all those different smoothing groups as islands in UV editor? Normals should be baking nicely even with them attached AFAIK. Or there is something I am missing.
    Great tutorial overall. Very clear, straight forward presentation.

  • raf

    why its not for downloading ?:(

    • Estevo

      To download these videos(as I did), you can download the with Real Media Player. There’s a download feature for any kind of video in any kind of format from any site.

      Your Welcome!

  • http://www.copasetic.tk puja

    the baking process is rather tedious.. i would have to use other application such us mudbox for baking maps.. but other than that, i learn lots of modeling techniques here..

  • http://www.copasetic.tk puja85

    any other tutorial that show easier for baking normal map??

  • Thom B

    Been Modeling for 2 months and half way through the 3rd tutorial… Learning a lot, keep up the good work.

    TY and all the best.

  • Max

    Super tutorial. Not for beginers:)

  • VitalOverdose

    Great tutorial but not as easy to follow as the first 2 for a beginner.

  • Joe

    Hey guys this is a fantastic tutorial although i am having two slight problems, if anyone thinks they might be able to help me please see the video i have showing the problems. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrOAhyhaUtQ , its not showing them very well but its something :)

  • Ted

    Awesome tutorials!Realy realy helpful!

  • TaterTot

    Thx for this tutorial, however I would like to see a tut in modeling low to high poly, properly setting up smoothing groups along with UV unwrapping.

    I can model high to low poly, unwrap and bake a pretty flawless normal map, I just can’t grasp smoothing groups and breaking up the groups in the uv unwrap.

    Im getting tripled vertices’ in the UDK along with lighting problems (being able to see the hidden tris).

  • andy

    excellent tutorial thanks,

    when i do the expoded bake and detach polys from my mesh, i get left with holes / missing polygons where they have been detached,

    what am i doing wrong?

    once again thanks for this tutorial

    andy

  • Rhonda

    For unwrapping the grip (the inner polys, not the mirrored sides) – it would have been easier to create the seam first (select the edge then convert edge selection to seam). Then if you would have used edge ring and converted the edge selection to faces, projected the mapping or used pelt map > relaxed, you would be done (instead of going in and selecting all the parts, projecting each chunk, then piecing together the UV islands). I hope that made sense. {:)

    Thanks for the tuts. I was stunned at the floating geometry stuff you taught for the high poly as I hadn’t heard of this before.

  • http://N/A Robert Skinner

    Dude, this tut is awesome, I had previous knowledge with unwrapping but this really tied up the loose ends

    Thanks =D

  • http://3dwally.blogspot.com/ adewale haroun

    Can you make these tutorial videos downloadable please?

  • ivan

    Hello, can someone tell me how does he UV map the blade beacuse i cant figure it out i select one side of blade then i uncheck the normalize map and press quick planar map but i still have to UV map the other side of blade even if its the same??

  • ivan

    Fixed the problem just added symmetry.

  • Amber

    These tutorials are a lifesaver. Thank you (and your brother) so much! I have to agree though, wish I could download these videos, it would be a lot easier :-(

  • Hooch

    Hello.
    Why you can’t have one UV island with 2 smooting groupt. I’m very often doing one island with more then one smooting group. I never saw and “bugs”. Can you explain it a little bit more?

  • Estevo

    Wow! man, you rock! I have a question: If I model a high-poly in only at few parts of my model I can still bake the textures normally?

    Thanks and GREAT MAN!

  • Roc

    Great tutorial. I only discovered it a couple of weeks ago. I never fully understood unwrapping and baking. So I was wondering how the process works. When taking the high poly object and placing it over the low poly object, should the high poly object fully cover the low poly object to bake in its shape? Not sure I fully understand what’s happening during a bake.

    Thanks for taking the time to put out a great tut!

  • http://www.facebook.com/ooCaptainCrazyoo Armoured Fury

    Been a 3D model artist for 12 years, i’ve put this off for far too long lol. It’s truly fascinating to watch!