Texture UV Groups

[jase439]

I am using Milkshape 1.8.0 and attempting to do some UV work within the tool.  I feel like I'm performing brain surgery with a fishing pole.

I am trying to create a new UV texture group (but do not desire a separate mesh group).  For example, the arms of the standard body mesh are broken into 4 distinct UV groups...left front, right front, left back, right back...the textures of which are placed at different locations in the skin texture.  Physically, the arms are all part of the same "body" group in the mesh, however.  But for texturing purposes, they are divorced from it.

I want to take a part of the existing mesh - like a hand for example, and map JUST the hand by itself to another location in the texture.  However, I cannot figure out how to accomplish this simple task in Milkshape because the UV nodes in the hands are "tethered" with the rest of the arm.  I want to separate the hand from the rest of the arm for texturing purposes only in the same way the arms are separated from the trunk of the body.

OmG, lIkE hEeEeeLlpPpp!!!1111

J

[BlooM]

I can seperate them into 4 groups if you like?
Wat gender?
Ez way to seperate them is to select all and assigne a material to the body.
Then select the hand(by faces, not verts) start by selecting the fingers and move on to the wrist.
In the mean time look at the uvmap and look if you have selected the complete hand, the moment you have the complete hand, regroup it.
You can do the same with the top and bottom of the hands and the back and front of the arms.
The arms and hands are mapped from the top and bottom, make sure you are in that view when you select them
If you want to divorce top and bottom hand:
Select from the top and make sure you have ''ignore backfaces marked''
This is the ez way i think.

[jase439]

Well, this technique has almost worked.  I regrouped the hand, set up the UV's the way I wanted them, then ungrouped them so that all verts are reassociated with "body".  The effect looks correct in Milkshape w/ the UV's "divorced" from the rest of the body and mapped to another area of the texture.  This is exactly what I was after, but when I export the GMDC, the hand is no longer textured. :\

Maybe I need an update of WesH's tools.

[wes_h]

The UniMesh exporter should support what you are doing. I cannot say whether there is an issue in the UV mapper.

Whenever you map something like your hand to a "divorced" area of the UV map, you need to make a seam, i.e. a row of duplicated vertices where the hand joins the arm. This is because of the way that Sims2 mesh elements are aligned. All elements (except the faces) are in sets that are aligned with the vertices. So a vertex may have one and only one UV coordinate. Where you want one set of faces to stop HERE on the UV map and the adjacent face to start THERE on the uv map, the shared vertices have to be converted into seperate vertices, colocated.

This is the way the original Maxis meshes are made (with seams). That is the reason I preached "no welding" because welding combines vertices at identical locations, removing the carefully placed seams.

Note that other games, and MilkShape, have a different layout, where the UV and normals associate with the faces. That is more common on OpenGL based graphics, while the vertex-aligned elements is more commonly used on DirectX based games.

From your description of the problem, I think that shared vertices is what is tripping up your effort.

<* Wes *>

[jase439]

Thanks, Wes.  Is there an easy way to replicate these points after the fact to create this seam?  Or do I manually have to redefine all the faces along the seam?

[wes_h]

It will require some detail work, because the faces have to be seperated also. One thing that may work is to duplicate the hand by selecting all that should be part of your seperately textured hand and use "duplicate selection". Unselect and hide that new group, then delete the hand off the mesh, leaving the vertices that will be at a shared location in place. Do this to both hands, and then regroup.

You should be able to more easily seperate the texture mapping when the hands are still in seperate groups (probably named Duplicate01 and Duplicate03).

You can use the smoothing groups as a sort of submesh selection tool. By this I mean the main group will be in smoothing group 1 by default. When you have the duplicated hands, select one and then assign it to smoothing group 2, and the other to three. Then, even after they are regrouped, you can select just one hand by unselecting everything else and selecting smoothing group 2.

<* Wes *>