help UV's be my friend

[murdoch]

Greetings All,

i'm trying to put a UV map onto the side of the letter L. thought this would be a breeze but it not working out - stretching and pinching. the object is sub div mode. the UV is planar along the X coordinate (in desparation i've also tried cylindrical on the Z but no good either). it doesn't matter how i reorganize the points in the UV window the textures screws up somewhere. attached is a grab that should better show the situation.

if i turn sub d's off i can get it working better but when i turn them back on it screws up again. i've also tried unwelding and merging - no good. i really need alot of polys as the object will render out large and i don't fancy pushing hundreds of points around, not to mention the other letters that need doing.

any pointers appreciated.
Thanks

[murdoch]

image

[murdoch]

how do you add more than one image to a post?

[mufty]

I've had this kind of problem before and I think it has something to do with the way Sub D's alter the position of points (for smoothing). The way I got round it was by adding more polygons to the model and re-doing the UV map. For your model I'd suggest using BandSaw to increase the number of segments between the curved ends. It seems if you have more points to "anchor" the texture, the less distortion you get.

I'd take my suggestion with care though, as my experience with LightWave and UV's is quite limited.

[TerryFord]

What you've described is a known issue with SubD UVs in LightWave. If it absolutly has to be UV mapped then do as mufty suggested and try to make the geometry more uniformly divided.

Alternativly, you could either use standard non-UV mapping, or freeze the object and UV that. UVs aren't necessarily "better" than the standard texture projections, consider weither you actually need UVs in this case...


Regards,
Terry

[murdoch]

Thanks for the input guys.

i managed to figure out more polys would help as a letter i'd done earlier, which sort of worked ok, had plenty more polygons.

i had considered not using uv's but a few letters just plain demanded it.

Thanks again

[JDaniel]

This is a good ex. for my work a round tutorial below.
Make an endomorf, w/ your original lower poly vers., so that the polys you're mapping to are flat. Go into layout, activate your endomorf, and line up the image on the handle w/ front projection. Bake it to your uv map as an image. Deactivate the endomorf w/ baked image will have zero distortion. Tweak the levels of the baked image in Photoshop. :)

ps: The baked image will come out distorted, but when rendered it's not. :D