Happy Back To Work Day!

 It's Monday, it's work-o'clock!

My productivity ground to a halt a few days ago. Today is the day that I get my s*it together and return to productivity city.

Sparrow Films/Raptor (SF/Raptor) 

Established that there's no zoom in the establishing shots. I only need the camera positions for the top-level and mid-level shots. The outstanding work is to generate a much larger planet map that incorporates realistic terrain texturing that works at close range. But how big? I tested 21k (21,000 pixels along the horizontal axis), which is enormous and also inadequate.

The fix?

Two options:

A separate model that doesn't need the entire planet's texture file, leaving more pixels for smaller areas.

UDIMs that support areas of a model having higher texture resolution. This technique is used for character models where you want the face to be super-detailed but are less bothered about the character's feet and toenails.

Let's explore UDIMs, which I've never used.

UDIMs

UDIMS (U Dimensions) are a texture-mapping technique that increases efficiency and supports different texture resolutions on the same model. 

When a 3D model uses texture mapping, it usually projects texture files onto its surfaces using UV space, which you can think of as a flat-packed version of the model's 3D surfaces. Usually, all the textures in a single UV must fit into the UV's grid space, which can be very limiting.

UDIMS tiles the UV space, so that you can use different textures for different UV islands, which are moved to different UDIM tiles.

Setting up in Blender

There's no special setup for UDIMS workflow. 

Create a new image and make it Tiled.

Under the image's N-panel, you can add additional UDIM tiles

The first UDIM tile has the ID 1001. The next tile along is 1002, through to 1010. Then a new row of tiles is started, beginning with 1011.

So, in theory, my planet UDIMs will look like this:

Main tile 1001: 4k; 1002 is the cutout area in a separate 16k tile.

Running on rails??

<A few hours later>

Well, that was a lot of faffing about in trial and error. It looks like my fine idea of imposing UDIM on the existing setup was never going to work because the UDIMs are instantiated through the non-standard filenames.

I had to go back to basics and create from scratch.

scratch-built UDIM files with flat colours in place.

Test UDIM success!

Now here's the extra faff; If I want to show some actual texture maps, I'm going to need to create my own, otherwise I breach my NDA. I could go back to the Aurore map I started creating.

More in the week

This is going to be my main effort, and while I have conquered the basics of UDIMs, I suspect that getting actual texture maps into place will pose its own challenges, as there will be a seam/visible split between the maps, which might look obvious. That's the next test, I guess.

Modelling

More HardOPs practice, possibly continuing with the space ship crew chair.

More on the Shamrayev. I'm not sure it's a ship that would find a market place, but a ship model might be a future commercial endeavour.

Commerical

I want to start selling more stuff on Superhive. I will need to consider what I can do well, which will also attract a market. I think a really good set of planet maps or a Blender planet could be a good option.