Model Unwrapping

This blog focuses on work done for the unwrapping stage of this model, hence why its been a little while since an update has been posted. The model at this point is mostly unwrapped, and i'll give a brief showing as to how I went about this.

During an event called Animex, where professionals come to give lectures and networking, I showed my work to a few of the lecturers. Overall they liked the model, but noticed some of the lower poly models I'd  made were immediately noticeable from the rest of the model. So I went through one final round of optimisations, to ensure that no future problems in the aesthetic would occur again.
To start with, I immediately knew that since I had been building the models with no particular scale in mind, it was finally time to define it.

As shown below, the green areas show finished/unaffected pieces, and the red where areas that needed further work to be done. This usually involved removing unneeded edges or separating parts and reattaching to make the topology flow better. This took a little while, but was worth the effort.

Final Optimisation stage.

With this done, I went on to dealing with scaling issues on the model. Since I want to try and render the model from within the unreal 4.6 Engine, I had to found out what the correct scaling I had to go with. So i started by looking up the unreal to max scale for a playable character model, which is 190cm (6 Foot) tall, since one cm= one unreal unit in the engine. Max's normal units setting didn't open with the centimeter scale on, so I went into the scale settings and adjusted it to the correct units.

I then created a box to match the measurements, and placed 3 on top of each other. I then also created a biped, matched the same height, and placed 3 within the scene as well. This was to ensure I had an idea of how tall a 6 foot human character would be compared to the Robotic Mech.

Human and blcok scale at a height of 190cm per  individual model.

I then scaled down the main robotic mech model and the custom parts to roughly match the height of the bipeds and box towers. I also had to reset the x-forms for each model's piece, in order to avoid any topology issues that would have affected any textures applied to the model.

Optimised model with correct scale.

Original scale compared to the correct one. 

With this done, I finally started the unwrapping phase. This has taken a fair few days so far, and has been relatively easy to do. The main time consumption is through the number of pieces the model has. It has also taught me that some pieces work better when separated into smaller chunks. One such example was the tanks hull, which originally was one piece. It is now been separated into 4 components, which has made unwrapping it a lot easier to do.

Below shows you my work process. I started by applying a checker texture to the entire model. Any pieces that I finished unwrapping are colour in silver, whilst ones that are still in progress are coloured red. Any that haven't been touched are coloured in a standard UV checker texture colour.

Red for unwrap in progress, silver for finished, and the UV checker for yet to be unwrapped

Unwrap at its current stage.

This image shows you how far I am into the basic stages of the unwrap process. As you can see, theres not an awful left to do now at this point.

The main focus isto get the unwrapping done. Additionally, testing out colour schemes on the 3D model is also important, which is why in the next blog entry I will be showing basic paint over work done on an earlier rendition of the Robotic Mech.