WIP: Aphrael UV Mapping

Greetings and salutations! Today I will show off the UV maps that I just completed for Aphrael. UV mapping is one of the things I enjoy doing when building a character. In fact, I find it quite easy. For Aphrael, it probably took me only 8-9 hours UV mapping her. UV mapping can get complex, but as long as you keep track of what you are doing, you'll be fine.

Anyway so let me show the texture distribution first on the model and then I will explain what I did.

UV density in the front view.

UV density in the back view.

First I created a texture that used a multicolored tiled texture for its appearance. I assigned that to the unmapped model and then used that as a guide to eliminate stretching as much as possible. Notice how there is almost no stretching of the tiles? One of the goals of UV mapping is to keep texture stretching to a minimum. The reason for this is because it will look terrible on the model. Can you imagine seeing the texture on a shirt looking all stretched out? Yeah, that would look weird.

Another thing that I did was that I cut my seams in places where seams would naturally occur in the real world such as the seams on Aphrael's clothing or on the back of the hose she is wearing. Keeping seams at a minimal is ideal as well but when you have a complex object such as this to map out, it makes more sense to place seams where they would be at in the real world. This ups the seam count a bit but at the same time keeps the texture mapping much more manageable.

At the same time, sometimes it is better to keep specific surfaces as a continuous surface rather than cut a seam. I actually did a combination of both so as to help minimize the effect it would have on the model in Unreal Engine 4 and for consistency. So you can see how I actually set up the maps, I will show the four UV sets below.

Skin UV set.

Upper body UV set.

Lower body UV set.

Ruffles UV set.

As you can tell, I have continuous surfaces in some areas (like the skin) and full cuts in others. The full cuts are usually on the clothing where seams occur in real life. In addition, note that I have four different UV sets which normally is not ideal for game engines. The reason I have four sets is because this will allow me to maximize the texture quality in Unreal Engine 4 without compromising memory. Each set will have its own RGB mask to drive where tiling textures will occur. The texture details will then be provided by those tiled textures. Small 256x256 square texture files are a lot easier on memory than a full 2048x2048 map. The only 2048 maps that I will be using is for the skin UV set and that is because skin is unique and I need to ensure it actually looks like skin. Tiling textures do not work very well for this purpose since skin is very complex and requires time and dedication to get right.

So that is a little bit of insight into my texturing process. The next time I post about Aphrael, I will have started the actual texturing process so stay tuned!