Basic UV knowledge. Does the 2D aspect even matter with 3D coat?

[Devin]

I have very limited general 3D knowledge and when following the crocodile tutorial, when coming to the UV part, i’ve come to a few basic questions.

 

Does having a lot of islands actually matter? If you are going to animate the model. With this model on the picture i have just focused primarily on getting minimal red area’s on the island and more even and bright areas. (which mean they are more flat i suppose? that somehow seemed more important to me than the island count) But honestly, i don’t even know why that would be important either.. Like: if you can just paint on the model in 3D coat anyway? and don’t even use the 2D thing? (in photoshop or something) Why would you even care about the islands, or having red area’s? and the 2D aspect of the textures as a whole. Does it matter in any way?

 

Thanks in advance

 

Edited April 7, 2016 by Devin

[Gary Dave]

Admittedly, the need for an amazing UV layout with well thought out seams does have a lesser priority when it comes to painting directly on the mesh. That said, trying to get good UV's would still be a good habit to get into. It's one of those "You can break the rules as soon as you understand the rules" situations. There is also the issue of how normals are rendered in other packages, diffuse/albedo seams are pretty much impossible to spot with the mesh-painting approach, but normal map seams are still very much a thing. If you drop your alligator into something like unreal or unity, even 3ds max/maya and render it with a normal map applied, you're going to notice a lot of uv seams.

 

There is also the notion that people don't 100% complete their textures by mesh painting, a lot of people will elect to drop out of 3dc in favour of photoshop at a certain point. This goes double for when you're working in teams, if someone else just needs to do a quick texture adjustment and they load up your PSDs and are confronted with hundreds of UV islands with no easy way of seeing how it corresponds to the mesh, you're going to have problems. You also might just want to change something quickly without having to open 3dc and go through all the exporting again.

 

As for the flat Vs squishy UV's, this is the same principle as scaling uv islands so you're not dealing with a 1:1 ratio, there are of course instances where scaling separate islands would be beneficial (ie, scaling down an area that is rarely seen), but it becomes a problem when 1 UV island in itself has odd "scaling" with itself. As an example, lets say you've quickly mapped a leg and foot as 1 uv island. The leg unwraps fine but the foot is getting all sorts of squished, your brush strokes will behave as expected on the leg, but you're going to notice some pretty weird skew's on the foot because its texel density doesn't match the leg.