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merging UV Set to Paint room in multiple steps: UV Layout overwritten?


Gian-Reto
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I might have an unusual problem here, or just an extremly noobish question:

 

I have a mesh that is made up of many submeshes, to make the complexity more managebal. Now I tried baking and merging them to the paint room separately, which works just fine in 3D coat. multiple of the meshes share the same UV map though, to get the amount of separate textures down and make better use of UV space.

 

Everything looks fine in the 3D Coat paint room...

 

 

When I try to export to an object file, for one I get empty normal maps (which I then need to export separately to get actually filled normal maps), but more alarming is that the UV maps seem to only contain a single mesh, I guess the last one of the UV group I merged to the paint room.

 

Now I left the UV name the same while merging the submeshes that belong to the same UV map to the paint room.

Could it be that the UV Map gets wiped and overwritten every time I merge another mesh belonging to the same uv map to the paintroom? Can I prevent this somehow?

The reason why I rather not merge all submeshes at once is that I fear the baking will then bake the wrong things, as these submeshes and their respective voxel objects are intersecting.... can I somehow prevent that and merge everything in one go?

 

 

Thanks for any help!

 

Gian-Reto

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One workflow:

 

Check out the video by AbnRanger it should help with your problem at least to get the items baked in one go...

 

Once you have baked all the items with their respective uv sets, then you can switch to the uv room and place them on one uv map. but the the islands have to stay in their original orientation for the normal map to stay correct. Scaling and arranging is no problem but orientation can not change...

You can manually scale and move the islands according to the texture space needs of each island or you can use PackUV2 to have 3DCoat do it but it might not meet your specific texture space size for each island...

Once you are done moving the islands to one uv map, then you can delete the unused maps and apply the new uv set. It will be updated in the paint room leaving you only one uv set...

 

post-518-0-17811200-1418918684_thumb.png

Edited by digman
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Okay, thats actually an extremly useful tool...

 

though If I understand correctly, it will only merge all the layers into the paint room in one go, it will _NOT_ manage the UV Sets containing multiple layers for me, so I still need to place each object in its own UV Set and combine them later, right?

 

As I have quite a mess with my voxel layers (lots of junk still laying around... yeah, I know, bad practice) and the naming of voxel and retopo layers, and I most probably had to single out all the objects into their own UV sets, I came up with another workflow:

 

- All my retopo Meshes sharing an UV Set got moved into their own UV Set without any re-unwrap. That way the topology in the UV Set stayed the same.

- Each mesh got then merged to the paint room separately. Yes, it takes time, but its actually one of the easier steps.

- I export the Textures for each UV Set, load them into gimp as layers (Gimp instead of photoshop because switching color for transparency is easier, and I had to do that for the empty sections of each layer), and save the combined UV Set as a png.

 

That should do the job, and makes sure I don't have to re-unwrap or shuffle any part of my UV Set.

 

 

Thanks a lot for the vid though... I will certainly make sure to try it with my next sculpt.

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I think I slightly misunderstood your question. Sorry about that. Below is for future reference.

 

You can use Sequential Baking to bake intersecting items and keep them on one uv set.

Unwrap all your voxel retopo objects to one uv set at one go. Make sure the retopo groups and voxel layers are not hidden when you do this.

Then use Sequential Baking to bake separately each retopo group layer and corresponding voxel layer (both named the same.)

The baking process will bake each layer separate but they all will be placed on the same uv set in the order that you had set the islands in the uv space.

Edited by digman
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To be safe you could hide them and avoid too much cutter anyway.  I do not know if they are intersecting your items that are going to be baked and whether that would effect the baking or not. I normally hide unneeded voxel layers when baking...

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