I finished all the UV's for the new sword pack today!
I had been exporting to OBJ file format from Lightwave, importing that into ZBrush, and then creating the displacement maps and UV's, porting back to Lightwave to complete the textures and then back to ZBrush to hand paint any needy areas. And... Back to Lightwave to apply the bump and specular maps. GAH!
The problem was that Lightwave does not port to ZBrush well. I was losing or getting jumbled polygons, even on simple primitives, and then I would have to go in and manually fix that before I could continue. The one click optimized UV map maker plug in for ZBrush is WAY COOL, BUT.... doesn't always put the seems in good places, even when you try and make it place them where you want them.
This whole process was taking too long, and I was spending a lot of time recreating textures or repositioning models to try and get them to UV map properly. SO.... I got frustrated, threw them all into UU3d, and did a simple 2 sided UV map for them. (OK, maybe I did a bit more than that, but in the end, that's what it will look like). The UV's for swords 4+ will not be optimized, and there is going to be some pixel stretching along the hilt top and bottoms, but I don't think anyone is really going to notice. (Those with textel ratio fetishes probably just shouldn't buy the pack)!
In short, I can now concentrate on just creating color maps and MAY still have this thing done by Christmas! (Or close)!
