My second question, though, involves UV mapping or UV unwrapping. The link for the UV unwrap tool I used for Truespace has expired, so I'm left looking for another tool. All I really need is a simple, concise tool for unwrapping the UV map of a texture so that I can paint it and what not.

I appreciate any assitance you can give me, and thanks in advance for you help.

~Ereon

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How far that little candle throws its beams; So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Portia The Merchant of Venice

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1Jo 2:9-10 He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now. 10 He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him.
Joh 17:26 And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.

[VoHW] (Help needed) [Blog] - Truedisciple (mp3)

[This message has been edited by jari (edited October 23, 2006).]

Another point is that by using them you only save hard drive space and nothing more. When the jpg is loaded into VRAM it turns into a hefty texture file just like any other. So if you use a raw and uncompressed texture like a bmp or a lossy and compressed jpg they both take up the same amount of video memory. So your even though your 1024x1024 face.jpg may be 10k on your hard drive it will still equal 4MB in VRAM just like every other image format.

In VRAM it does not stay in the .jpg format, and what is really tweaked is that it takes extra resources to uncompress the image to what VRAM can really read. So if you are in a game engine having everything being rendered in real-time, you may see rendering slowdown when the models with jpg’s come into camera range.

What’s sad is that when you go to like turbo squid.com and search for fee textures, there mainly .jpg’s! So unless you make the textures yourself or buy them from a reputable source that isn’t compressing them into worthless jpg’s, you are out of luck. It’s like the worlds best kept secret or something.

What to use? PNG has gotta be the best format to do 3d model textures in imo. Also tiff is something that others would recommend. I use a lot of BMP’s myself but that depends on what I’m applying them to, it lacks layers but no big deal. The downside with tiff is that it has a paten. Downside to png is that it uses color management but no problem at all. Here is a really good technical chart (scroll down the page): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_image_file_formats

As for an unrapper you may want to check out these:
LithUnwrap : http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=1755
Ultimate Unwrap 3D: http://www.unwrap3d.com/

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How far that little candle throws its beams; So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Portia The Merchant of Venice

edit: oops, now it should be the right link lol

[This message has been edited by Faith_Warrior (edited October 23, 2006).]

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How far that little candle throws its beams; So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Portia The Merchant of Venice

.dds is Microsoft Direct Draw.

Basically it’s about video compression. If you are working with a massive amount of textures, have an editor that uses it and a game engine or rendering app that supports it than it’s a good format to use.

I’d use it but my game engine does not support it yet, but may in the future. You can apply the format using Lithunwrap and maybe find a photoshop plug-in to create them.

[This message has been edited by Faith_Warrior (edited October 24, 2006).]

I highly recommend using ATI and Nvidia's texture tools:

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html

http://www.ati.com/developer/tools.html

For computer gaming it’s a bit different. Often times there will be a setup option to use compression for computers with limited memory. Consoles are limited from the getgo so it’s more often forced upon the system just to run the application such as in a cross over game that works on both the PC and console. Personally, when a PC game offers such compression I shut it off as many do, I have the VRAM to run the game with out the image degradation. As for running rendering jobs outside of games, it is hardly used.

It’s still good to use, if you are creating a game and plan to target some low-end computer systems than it’s fantastic to have the option so that players can choose to use it or not, but should it be a standard for a PC game? I certainly hope not! It’s definitely better to use than Jpeg’s, those do not stay compressed in VRAM, but you still get some image degradation nonetheless.

[This message has been edited by Faith_Warrior (edited October 25, 2006).]

When quality becomes an issue, such as for heightmaps, normal maps, etc, use DXT5 or 3Dc instead of DXT1 or just switch compression off completely. But for the average texture there isn't a major reason to not use compression.

http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/TextureComparison

http://www.codeproject.com/cs/media/NormalMapCompressor.asp?print=true

[This message has been edited by Gump (edited October 25, 2006).]

P.S. My goal is to have it ready by Monday

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How far that little candle throws its beams; So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Portia The Merchant of Venice