UV Mapping: Ugh!

So after saving all of my already made parts into a library, I opened each one and started the long and laborious process of resizing, fixing face normals, lowering polycount, and eventually *shudders* UV mapping.

In all seriousness, UV Mapping isn't all that bad, but its never my favorite thing to do, especially intricate hard surface models. I went through seven of sixteen already made pieces and fixed them. Getting late in the night, I decided to throw together a little test map comp in Marmoset to see how I did. I was pleased to see that everything turned out perfectly and whenever all of the models are made, I'll be set to sculpt small details and bake AO and Normal maps without need to backtrack and fix things. Right now, Hafu looks a bit plain, but I'm hoping that as time goes on his look will improve with pose, higher detail than "basic toy" and better color. I literally painted blobs of color selected from video screenshots to put on his base.

I also played around with an incredibly basic emissive map for his eyes, and I think it turned out nicely.

Overall I'm happy with the project's progress and hope to making some more efficient progress once the library is put into place and kept up with. Hafu is only 6208 tris which makes me pretty happy with the level of detail he's at. Sure, it could be lower, but he was around 8000 earlier and so I think that's quite an improvement.

My main goal for tomorrow (or today, rather) is to finish those parts and continue with actually making newer models instead of texturing Pohatu, of which I'm very tempted to do. I think Onewa will be my next target considering he has very few new parts and it will be a good excuse to make that hammer which can be recycled mostly into Hafu's chisel/pickaxe. This is all assuming I make progress on my library.

Well, I'm off for tonight and I'll have a good night's rest before starting back with the same thing tomorrow.


Edit: If you're curious, here's his texture map that I have each part divided up into individual sections. Worked out pretty well for putting him together.