Y3 Week 8: Rolling Along

A quick update, since I am once again a bit late with my blog post this week. Everything has been going smoothly and I was able to catch up with my work. I have now finished modelling and unwrapping all karts and started texturing the first one.

I focussed a lot on trying to improve my unwrapping speed during this week and I made use of several tools. One of the big ones was TexTools, which is a maxscript that includes an extended variety of tools to help you unwrap. I am glad I tried it out and I would recommend it to other people, since some of the tools are really quite helpful. More information about TexTools and what it can do can be found on the official website: http://www.renderhjs.net/textools/

Another very useful tool that I tried out this week was iPackThat. A piece of software that automatically packs your UVs as tightly as possible. I actually knew about this software for quite some time now, however I decided to first prove to myself that I am able to pack UVs manually if I need to do so, by packing previous projects myself. During this project I decided to instead let the program do this tedious step and I am quite happy with the results it gave me. The functionality of the software is great and it can pack a whole UV sheet in only a couple of minutes, speeding up the time it takes to do this step by a lot! You can find more information on iPackThat in this polycount thread: http://polycount.com/discussion/145328/uv-packer-ipackthat

With that I am already going to end this short post. Since I only just started on texturing I don't feel that it would be necessary to show off what I have gotten so far and instead I want to focus this week to get my textures done in time. All in all, I can't say that I particularly enjoy this project, but it definitely seems a lot better to me than modelling a realistic character, so I believe it was a good choice to swap projects.