METASEQUOIA v2.3.4 - REMAPPING THE UV ON AN EXISTING TEXTURE

       Good job. You've gone through and recolored your Texture and even added some cool strappy-things to the waist area. Only problem is, they start at the shoulders and warp down to the armpit. Or, you've completely changed the texture and it looks completely jumbled on your Model. Or, you're one of them Advanced Modders and you've already added a primitive to your Model, but the entire Model's Texture is wrapped around it. Not a problem.
       You know what UV Mapping is, but don't necessarily understand how it works? This will teach ya how. Each one of those Polygons in a Model is laid out flat on top of the Texture. By moving the UV Map around one or more Polygons at a time, you can precisely adjust where your Texture will be placed in accordance with the way your Model looks. By spreading the Polygons out and taking up a larger amount of space, you can create higher resolution textures. You will sacrifice space for other sections unless you double up on space.
       In this lengthy tutorial, I am going to remap my UV around Grumpy Rarab's nose and eyes, since I'm a poor man and only pasted them onto the Texture through MSPaint. I'll explain some techniques for Primitive Mapping at the end of this block of instruction.

Remapping your UV... uhh, Map...

Open Meta and Load your Model. That's the hard part.

Load the Model you plan to work with. If your new Texture isn't applied to the Model you open, I suggest reading the Model Viewer and Graphics Converter 3 tutorials.

On the Command Panel under Command>Edit click the UV Button.

This brings up the Screen of Confusion. Which, actually isn't all that confusing once you get accustomed to it. You'll see a Spatial View of your Model. Behind that, you'll see the UV Map of your Texture. You've also brought up the Commands and Buttons described here. If you're confused by what you see, I would recommend going there first.

First thing you want to do is make a note of all the changes you made and the amount of Polygons in the area of those changes. You can find this out easily by rotating your Spatial Model View around and selecting all of the Polygons within the area you want colored. When selecting them on the Model, you'll see that it also selects them on the UV Map. Be forewarned though, if you move them on the UV immediately after selecting them on the Model, you will detach the Polygons from the surrounding Polygons. This doesn't necessarily create an issue, but it can make your project alot more confusing.

In my case, I can see that I colored a bit too wide for my nose and completely covered my eye. Some of the Polygons fall outside of the texture area and some from the fur portion of the nose fall too far within the red. Let's fix that.

Now, we can tackle these two problems in a number of ways. I'm going to cover the easiest for both types of issues. Our first issue is the nose fur "bleeding" into the red of the nose tip.

Be sure you've selected the Move Tool. We're going to solve this quite easily by selecting all of the Vertices after the nose tip area and moving them back.

Double check on your Model View by rotating it around and making sure you didn't move it too far or too little.

If you're in the general area, then you can make some fine adjustments one Vertex at a time.

End product is a perfectly Textured bulbous nose. But the eye is still off a little.

Since we know exactly where the eye UV is and it isn't attached to any other Polygons, it will just be a matter of resizing and aligning.

Select the entire eye UV portion.

Since my overly large pasted eye is too big for the UV, but still follows the general shape, all I need to do is Scale it using the Scale Tool in the UV Extension.

Then, I can select one horizontal portion of Vertices at a time and align them. At this point, it's purely for aesthetics, but I wanted to show it being done.

After I make my fine adjustments, I verify on my Spatial Model View that everything looks good.

And that's that. Done. All that's left is saving and reloading the .MQO into a .DAT to be used ingame.

Some Advanced UV Techniques...

When you add a primitive to your Model with VRS, you know you can give it some basic coordinates for UV Mapping. However, when you come to edit the UV Map in Meta, you find that your UV Map is a mess. Clean this up easily by selecting the Model areas of the Primitive and then grabbing them immediately off of the Texture. You can then Scale and Move them completely off of the texture to rework them into the shape you need. This gives a much less confusing approach to completely remapping new objects.

Also, sometimes when you add a Primitive and then open it with Meta, it still gives your Primitives the default Grey coloring. You can solve this by opening the Material Panel and deleting any other Textures. Then, using the Mat Button in Command Panel>Face, you can color your Primitive with the existing Texture and then remap the UV from there.

If you're starting completely over with a brand new Texture that doesn't mirror the previous one, I would recommend using the Atlas and Export features before you make a new Texture. In this way, you can remap your UV into a general semblance of your Model and make the final UV Mapping process much less time consuming.

If for some reason you're using only a solid color for a portion of your Texture, save space on your UV Map for detail on other areas by combining the Vertices or scaling them down to fit inside a small patch of that color. Solid colors won't present a high or low resolution.

Have a problem figuring out with Polygons go where for a certain section? Try selecting them one at a time on the Model and then moving them on the Texture. This will actually detach the Polygon and allow you to move it to a specific area, as well as figuring out which direction it should be facing.

Š2006 Grumpy Rarab Ltd.