![]() With the UVs good to go, I do a quick “Checkerboard” material test to make sure the UVs are as tight and clean as possible. Imagine peeling an orange - each part you peel off could be considered a UV island, and if you were to stitch those orange peels back together, it would resemble the orange again. When we deal with UVs in 3D, we generally perceive them as image files that will wrap around the model. The goal here is to create a low poly model that captures the shape as much as possible, while keeping in mind that my final poly count should stay well under 10,000.Īfter attaching the parts together, I’m ready to UV unwrap each base mesh part into UV islands. Each new poly I add is carefully evaluated and determined if it’s needed to match the form of the iconic design of the X-Wing. I’m constantly switching to an invisible/x-ray mode to help follow the contour/form and shape of the source X-Wing on which I’m working. Starting with a “box” converted to editable poly and subdivided, I started pushing and pulling vertices around, adding edge loops where applicable, and building up to what will be the nose, cockpit, and back engines. In the end, it’s faster to build a low poly base mesh and have more control over the topology and UVs. Why not just use some mesh optimizing tools to reduce the source models in Max? Short answer to that: the number of polys that are intersecting on the source’s model would have produced undesirable results all over the place, which left us no choice but to manually delete polys anyway. These can take high poly models and merge polygons together, usually reducing the number of them. In Autodesk 3DS MAX, I import the client’s high poly model into a scene, in this case Poe’s X-Wing! I’m only using the high poly model as a guide while I create base meshes that conform to the parts of the ship we needed.ģD programs all offer some form of 3D model optimizing tools. This new texture would also match up with the sections of the ship on which I would reorganize the UVs. I started manipulating those texture files in Photoshop and combining them into one texture. Dozens of 4K textures made up each ship part, which relied on the UDIM UV placement to display correctly. The client provided various 4K texture files associated with the X-Wing. So, before I could texture bake, I needed to prep the source models. We’ve always had better results with texture bakes on models that don’t use UDIMs. The solution was a combination of building low poly base meshes, or very simple geometry that captures the 3D form of the ships, and using texture baking techniques, which I will expand on momentarily, to capture as much detail from the client’s source models as possible. So, how do we use these awesome models in our game? Using these models directly in Unity, however, would have been crippling to performance, and the texture placement would have been all out of whack. ![]() This is understandable considering they were used in film production and the highest quality texture rendering was to be expected. However, its support for UDIM UV placement is not available yet. The agreed engine to be used for our game was Unity 2018.3.5. Furthermore, each ship model contained over several million polygons. ![]() The models sent to us by Lucas Films consisted of UDIM UVs, and generally they were associated with several 4K textures. In this blog, I go over some of the tricks and processes we used to convert production-ready, high-quality 3D ships from the television series for use in our mobile game, Star Wars: Resistance Racer. Perhaps down the road with new phones and 5G networks we might, but for current gen phones we need to stick to more traditional game development methods. Simply put, if we tried to use them, performance would drop like a ton of bricks on mobile devices. It’s always nice to work with high quality assets provided by clients, but for game development on mobile devices, we just don’t have the luxury to use 4K textures and high poly models.
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