Skip to main content

Optimising Textures

In order to optimise and improve the quality of our project, it was essential that I went back into our Substance Painter files and our asset model file in Maya, and ultimately optimised them.

Until this point, we hadn't moved our assets UVs into one map, and instead, were using multiple maps.  DISASTER.

Image result for this is fine meme gif



ANYWAY, we are fixing it.  Moving all UVs of each model into one map means that when applying textured and exporting them to input into Unity, there will be much less clutter and texture overlap.

At this stage, this will help in a huge way for us as currently, the way we exported and imported, we had thousands...and thousands....AND THOUSANDS of textures in the unity scene.  Each asset could have had as much as 40 textures on it.  UNBELIEVABLE AND IN NEED OF FIXING.

So here we are, going in, moving all UVs (after being correctly unfolded and laid out in Maya) and exporting them into Substance.  From here, it's about reapplying the textures from before and developing them further and then exporting as one UV map instead of several.  This would mean that each asset could have a maximum of 6 textures and 7 id opacity featured in the texture.  This has cut our texture list in unity from about 27,000, to 197.  A big and much needed change.




This is one of many ways we hope to optimise the scene.  Next up is to delete unneeded faces and parts our scene that the user will never see.  After this, it will be to import image planes to replace certain 3D models that are not engaged with or that do not change form throughout the narrative.  These changes will be described in depth in future posts.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CV and Business Card

Before heading into the big bad world of employment and potential freelance work, it is essential we leaving Undergraduate level with a professional portfolio of components we can use to sell our skills and help put us on the industry map to propel us towards a future career. This is in regards to two main pieces of self promotion.  The CV and business card.  It is important we have these designed, printed and accessible on the night of our end of year show so that company reps, directors and other industry members can view our projects and then take something tangible away from it to remember who we are and what we are capable of. When it comes to CV, I have always been taught through my years of business orientated education that it is simple, clean and not overly creative.  I was always taught that colour is tacky, images are resented and icons are acceptable but need to remain minimal.  When I approached this initial design stage of an updated and a...

Optimising Models

To optimise our scene even further, myself and our Director, Cassie, decided to start deleting faces for various models in our scene that are never seen by the user.  These are mainly on furniture, large counters, table items, counter items, fridge and kitchen door.  In this blog, I will post the videos of a few of the newly optimised models, some images from the process and explanations from other blogs and videos I watched as to how basic models need to be to ensure our scene is optimised as much as it can be. I found the article from Evermotion on optimising scenes to be very helpful in giving me the knowledge and understanding of why optimisation is such a large part of a project such as ours.  The real time rendering that we will be using within unity is processing a lot of information at one time.  If a project has a lot of textures, geometry and animation, this can be described as an expensive project.  Not that it costs a lot of money, but rather i...

Refinements

With our animations coming together, we are continually making further refinements and edits to each of our scenes to ensure each part of our narrative flows and is effectively portrayed.  Below are some updated notes that our producer, Lorna share with me of her opinion and advice on my current animation.  They are refinements that will help the overall appeal and appearance of our story, as well as ensuring our users aren't distracted by actions and movements that look...just plain wrong. Lorna suggested the movement of the mug and the male character should have a frame deleted as it seemed pretty jerky.  Below is one of the animations created of the male after applying some of the feedback. Another development for my animations was to add in the AI walk cycles.  I struggled with matching these up but although some areas are floaty, the design and nature of our project and in particular, our environment, means that the whole walk cycle does not have to ...