UVs: The Good, Bad and Ugly

 

Elliott Mitchell Auto Unwrapping UV Devil 2016

UVs are often shrouded in mystery, or simply an afterthought to many 3D artists and game developers. Not only are UVs essential to texturing 3D models in Unity, UVs are required for Real-Time and Baked Global Illumination(Lightmapping). Unbeknownst to many, UVs may also have a profound influence on runtime performance and an artist’s iteration cycles.

[fancy_images width=”180″ height=”95″]
[image title=”Good UVs” caption=”Good UVs”]https://vermontdigitalarts.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Elliott-Mitchell-Good-UV-2016.png[/image]
[image title=”Bad UVs” caption=”Bad UVs”]https://vermontdigitalarts.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Elliott-Mitchell-Bad-UV-2016.png[/image]
[image title=”Ugly UVs” caption=”Ugly UVs”]https://vermontdigitalarts.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Elliott-Mitchell-Ugly-UV-2016.png[/image]
[/fancy_images]

Earlier this month, Elliott Mitchell (co-founder of Vermont Digital Arts) delivered a quick ten minute lightning talk on the subject of UVs at the Boston Unity Group. His presentation is a high level overview of UVs for the given truncated format. 

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5WrQSUdvKU[/embedyt]

Keep an eye out for a more fleshed out talk on UVs in the near future. There is so much more to cover. Here is a link to Elliott’s slides.

Unite 2013 Video: Successfully Avoiding Common Pathways to Heartbreak and Disaster in Your Art Pipeline

Do you make 3D art, animation and or use Unity to make multiplatform Games?  Anyone can download or make 3D art assets and anyone can make games in Unity. It is another story when it comes to creating an art pipeline that accounts for efficiency, flexibility, multiple resolutions for multiplatform optimizations. Art optimization begin in the tools one chooses to uses for content creation. Optimization is also dependent on the way tools are utilized and how they export assets for Unity. Finally, art optimization happen within the Unity editor, which varies for individual targeted platforms, with best art practices and smart coding.

Elliott Mitchell, co-founder of Vermont Digital Arts and the Boston Unity User Group, gave a Unite 2013 (Unity Developer’s Conference) talk on this topic last August in Vancouver, BC. Check out the video of his talk and check back here to see a series of blog posts on topics covered as well as the plethora of areas he didn’t have to touch upon in his talk at Unite.

[youtube url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HwsJiLtyw&feature=youtu.be” width=”640″ height=”355″ autohide=”0″ fs=”1″ rel=”0″]

Special thanks goes to Anzovin Studio for providing The Setup Machine for Games to Elliott and Vermont Digital Arts. In addition, Anzovin provided their expertise by rigging the Elliott’s 3D Samsquanch character as well as animating an Idle and Walk cycle for this demo!

Remember, there is no optimized game without good coding even if your art is exceptional. Make friends with talented engineers or learn to code yourself! It takes both sides of the brain to make great games!

Samsquanch at Unite 2013

Vermont Digital Arts is back from Unite 2013! What a conference!

Elliott Mitchell (founder of Vermont Digital Arts) presented on Successfully Avoiding Common Pathways to Heartbreak and Disasters in Your Art Pipeline last week at Unite. Due to popular demand, keep a posted on a series of upcoming mini-posts relating to Elliott’s talk.

Samsquanch Concept Sculpt for Unite 2013

Overall I feel my talk was well received by the audience at Unite 2013. The audience was an interesting mix of artists and developers with various levels of experience in Unity and art pipelines. I realized I only had time to cover a fraction of the content I thought was important so I just went with the flow and covered what I could in the allocated time. I’m looking forward to authoring a series of posts covering my talk and points beyond!

-Elliott Mitchell (Founder Vermont Digital Arts)

Elliott Mitchell Unite 2013 talk

Also we wanted to give a shout out to Anzovin Studio for the rigging and animation on Samsquanch with TSMG!

Unite 2013 talk.002

More to come….

Concept Sculpt Of Samsquanch: Work In Progress Part 1

New internal projects are in development at Vermont Digital Arts! We have been working on some original game designs and concept art for a variety of platforms including the Oculus Rift, Steam and a host of emergent mobile devices to be developed in Unity.

Vermonster Concept Scuplts

Vermonster Concept Sculpts by Elliott Mitchell ( Vermont Digital Arts )

Above is a sneak peak at a character rather early on in the concept art phase for an upcoming IP we are developing. This sculpt of a hybrid yeti-ape creature is modeled in ZBrush and is currently a whopping 13 million polygons. Today we hope to refine the basic form a little more then retopologize the creature in 3D Coat before modeling fine details and painting textures. It’d be great to hand a low poly version of this creature to our partners on the rigging and animation team at Anzovin Studio ASAP. It’s essential to identify problem areas in the geometry as early as possible and allow the animators time to work.

Check back to see a series of posts on the creative and technical processes that drive our development.