To UV or not to UV...

Tralfaz · October 2012

I was wondering what you folks do when it comes to 'painting' a model.

Do you UV map and texture everything or do you use materials from within your 3D application to accomplish the task? Do you do a balance of both or just one or the other?

The reason I ask is that I want to donate my Enterprise once it is finished. In terms of memory, textures can be hungry for your system memory. Also, not all the 3D apps I've played with imported and displayed the textures associated with the .OBJ file. Materials pretty much come in with the OBJ all the time. Textures can allow you to add enormous detail and effects. Textures can also be a pain in the butt to work with.

Using materials can mean adding cuts into the mesh in order so the material will follow a specific path. This in turn can add a drain on resources because of the extra polygons. Going with materials means that you don't run into the problem of the 3D program not finding a texture(s) when rendering or loading.

I am really, really torn between the options and would appreciate any input or advice you can provide.

Thanks in advance...
Al

tobiasrichter · October 2012

If you plan to share the model or use it with others, especially when they are using other software, do yourself and them a favour and UV the whole thing in as few textures as possible and use as few as possible internal textures of your package. I UV all my models that way and found it to be very efficient, although it may take a tiny bit more time initially. Memory shouldnAât be an issue today.

evil_genius_180 · October 2012

Personally, I do all textures. I definitely agree with Tobias about using as few internal materials as possible, those tend to not translate well into other software. Textures, meanwhile, can usually be pretty easily reapplied, especially if there aren't a whole lot of them.

IRML · October 2012

if I'm honest your concerns are kind of old school, I don't think UV maps or extra polygons really drain things enough to use one over the other any more, it's just down to choice - what is quickest, easiest, best quality etc....

Chris2005 · October 2012

Well, from my perspective, and I'll use the following 2 examples, Wil Jaspers Connie Refit and Prologic9's Galaxy Class with textures by JMoney, Wil Jaspers still takes an eternity to render on my computer, even though it's not really much higher in poly count than other models I have (don't get me wrong his model is absolutely fantastic) but compared to Prologic9's model with the HD textures JMoney made, Wil's takes a rather long time to render by itself... but it also depends on the materials I use as well, for example using a material to refract and blur the inside of the warp nacelles on Prologic's Galaxy class really adds to my render times... now a refraction with no blur is a cakewalk as is a reflection, but the blurring really brings my render times up... To render Prologic9's Galaxy with the textures at rendering resolution of 960x720 takes around 2.3GB of my 4GB of RAM...

I personally prefer textures over actually cutting the model and applying materials, for render time sake, but texturing like Wil's Refit allows for close up shots without causing blurry textures, since everything is modeled...

Tralfaz · October 2012

Thank you everyone for your answers. I've been leaning towards the textures route and what you have said pretty much confirms that is the way I should go. I highly respect the work you do and if I can attain just a part of what you can do, then I will be very happy.

Thanks again...
Al

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To UV or not to UV...

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