M16a2 W/ S.i.r. Handguard.

[CaptainMitchell365]

This is what the UV map looks like pretty much. Its no different.

http://inlinethumb31.webshots.com/42782/20...S600x600Q85.jpg

Now you see how there is the black triangles and blackness everywhere. I'd love to know how to get those out of there without adding a thousand skylights and having a very bright mess. What i did to finish the texture map, was just put big squares of each color over all the black. When i apply the texture in the viewport in 3dsmax it looks fantastic, in GRAW it looks like hell.

[CaptainMitchell365]

Any Idea? anyone? what i am doing wrong?

[SnowFella]

Simple and very common error..you have overlapping mapping co-ordinates, ie mirrored mapping, and that will NEVER go down well with texture baking in 3dsm. Judging by the lighting you are also using 3dsm's default lighting.

What happends is that you have faces on either sides of the model getting lit by different light information but getting baked into the same UV space = big mess! Your computer is virtually trying to put 2 pieces of information into the same space at the same time and that information clashes. Even with identical lighting you will get artifacts.

There's really only 2 way's of rectifying it.

1: fix up unique mapping for all parts. Your current UV layout is hugely wasteful and could do with alot of work. For example here's my my overlayed mapping of a P220, bit of difference in used space.

http://www.snowfella-modworks.com/pics/mapping-p220.jpg

2: Alternatively, if you want to keep mirrored mapping you have to shift all mirrored faces 1 whole step, Ie mapping works even if your uv co-cordinates are outside of that main square...move things 1 whole step outside of the square and they will still share UV space with what's inside the square.

[CaptainMitchell365]

Very interesting Snowfella i really appreciate the help, your real good at what you do. I'll give it a try asap.

[SnowFella]

Still learning here mate, although I've learnt enough over the years now to do this kinda thing as a second job.

Think the reason why it might look ok in max but not in graw2 for you would be smoothing and normalmap though. Colourmaps nowadays are taking a backseat to a good normalmap and specularmap when it comes to how good your model ends up looking ingame.

[CaptainMitchell365]

Very true, i've gotten a pretty good map, i'll post pictures of it tomarrow. Here's what i did.

1. Select poly

2.select material id to whichever one i want

3. Go to modifiers, UV MAP

4. In uv map, i ignored whether its a planar, box or whatever kind of set up , i dont think it mattered. I aligned with x axis, and then hit the "Fit" button.

5. After i fitted the UV Map i selected Unwrap UV

6. In the UV MAP editor i selected the mesh and hit normal maps, box mapping with a spacing of 0.2

Afterwards i select the modify tab and do select poly and repeat the process, and when i am finished i create a box and Attach it with the weapon model to clear up the modifier list, to prep it for exporting into graw.

This is in 3dsmax 7 , let me know if this is any different from your doing. Because my finished uv map or "rendered texture map" looks nothing like the beautiful texture maps in GRAW. And i was scared to go out of that little box so i scaled down most of my uvs. Not too little though.

As for the lighting, in the past you've reccomended using skylights. Sometimes i get lucky and sometimes i dont. When i was mapping the UMP, it gave it to me perfect by just using one skylight and the map turned just out how i wanted it to. The reason those little black triangles are there in the map, with the sig does that have something to do with abnormal geomatry? or is it lighting. If you have any tutorials on how to skin please let me know snow.

As for the mod update. I might be able to put something under your guy's christmas tree this wedensday.

[SnowFella]

That's pretty different to how I do it indeed.

I tend to manually unwrap all my pieces instead of trying something like planar/box or whatever mapping, no automatic system will ever equal full manual control of the mapping layout.

So what I do is generally in the lines of this, taken straight from memory as I don't have 3dsm running.

1: Assign a checker material to whatever I want to unwrap, will help me make sure I don't get any stretching anywhere

2: Select all the polys making up the piece you are working on, ie all polys on a slide or similar.

3: Add an "Unwrap UVW" modifier to the stack.

4: Click the "EDIT" button

5: In the "Edit UVW windows menu go "Mapping/Flatten and use the defauly settings.

6: Move/scale/stitch and join the different pieces together into a good mapping sollution.

7: Redo the same for all other bits of geometry

8: Select it all and lay out your final mapping

Mapping something "simple" as a P220 might take me 4 to 5 hours from start to finish and complex shapes a fair bit longer indeed...there's just no shortcuts in 3d work if you want to get it right.

As for skylights, all I use that for nowadays is to bake a decent Ambient Occlusion map from, just gives that nice selfshaded lightmaps that I can overlay on my colourmaps. And one skylight will be enough to get that from, more than one and all it's going to do is wash out the shading.

Now the "weird black triangles" are exactly what I said earlier, a result of overlapping mapping. If you in your mapping leave 2, or more, faces to share the same map-coordinates 3dsm will not know what face to bake first into that perticular texturespace and will try to do them all at once = collision of interest and the result will end up black or severely messed up.

[CaptainMitchell365]

Thanks a lot snow. I'm starting to get a lot better maps now.