Making of Paragalis – part 1

“Making of Paragalis – part 1 ” by Marcus Dublin
Now the last thing I want to touch on was the way in which I handled the UV chunks and mesh itself. When applying UV’s like this I usually delete the parts of the mesh that will be mirrored, and then I go ahead and work on the UV’s until it’s finished. Once the UV’s are done I select the parts of the mesh that are mirrored and clone that side of the mesh over to the other side. I then weld my vertices back into place when this is completed. I find this workflow to be much easier than doing UV’s for the whole mesh; it’s much more efficient and saves on the production time! With UV’s completed it’s time for me to arrange the UV chunks into the 0 to 1 UV space. I like to think of this step as one big jigsaw puzzle. With that said it’s always good to try and make use of every pixel and leave as little negative space as possible! You can see the final UV’s from the image below.

This is a “crucial” step in the creation process and should be handled with the utmost care. Most problems with, texture clarity, and normal map bakes can be traced directly back to the UV phase and is usually the culprit for many weird texture situations! Below is a short list of things to maintain when working with UV’s.
1. Always go for at least 95% distortion free textures. Having lots of distortion will result in blurry textures and bad normal map bakes.
2. Try and keep your UV chunks as vertical and horizontal as possible. This makes texturing / painting them easier, not to mention that it keeps your pixels aligned.
3. Make sure to maximize your UV space, keep the negative “black” areas to a minimum.
4. Keep the seams in places not easily seen by the viewer. Places like inner thighs, under arms, back of the neck, underbelly, etc. are good places to have seems.
5. Always try and add creative mirroring when possible to maximize your pixel resolution. Areas like hands, feet, neck, tail, wings, etc. are perfect candidates for this.
6. Always try and use large UV chunks and refrain from breaking your mesh up into lots of small pieces. This just creates more seems which will create more headaches!
7. Always apply a generous amount of pixel ratio to the places most seen by the viewer! For example the bottom of the creature’s feet didn’t receive the same pixel density, as its head or any other place of interest.
Step Eleven: Baking out Normal and Light maps
With the UV’s in place it’s time to get to one of the most important steps of the creation process, and that’s generating the normal and light maps! Now before I proceed with the workflow I want to highlight the fact that I’m running a PC with Windows XP64, 8gb of ram, Geforce 8800 GT 512mb, and a dual core 2.40ghz processor. The only reason that I’m highlighting this is due to the mesh sizes that I’m going to import into 3ds max. Currently I can comfortably import a model that’s roughly 5 million triangles in 3ds max 8 and around 6 million in 3ds max 9 without max crashing. With that said I would encourage you to do a few benchmark tests to see what you can work with on your own system! Okay so it’s time for the actual work flow.
Normal Map Generation
1. The first thing that I did was model UV’s and offset all of the mirrored UV chunks. I used “Chugnuts UV Tools” for this action and I highly recommend it to anyone using 3dsmax.

2. The next thing I did was hit “O” on the keyboard, this ensures that when I rotate the models all I can see is a bounding box!. This is a key since moving a dense mesh around your viewport can really slow down your system.

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