27 Apr 2010 - One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Texturing the vehicle is becoming almost as much of a nightmare as the track construction which, incidentally, is still not complete. Yet another stage of the project that's dragged it's heels, the UV unwrapping of the steamcar was simple enough in the earlier stages of the project but to organise its textures into seperate 'UV layers' took the whole of today and i'm VERY annoyed about that.

Turns out I misjudged how to tackle this, which added to the time it took - seperate UV Layers don't seem to work on a single mesh object (unless i'm missing something really fundamental but I haven't been taught about it in Maya). After a lot of anguish and readjusting the UV layers, I ended up combining sections of the model together, exporting those sections as seperate UV texture maps, and importing the steamcar's model into UDK again. Every time I export, I have to re-rig the model and i'm glad I found a relatively quick way to do this otherwise right now i'd be looking at a project without a car.

A quick test in the UDK (I say quick, but it keeps crashing and I seem to spend more time these days fighting against it than using it as a helpful tool, so it's more like an agonisingly frustrating process that I have to repeat several times before any shred of success) shows that, mercifully, the new imported file handles as it used to in the game level and that the textures are mapped to the relevant sections.

The Maxton uses four textures - seen here colour coded in the UDK

Tomorrow, hopefully i'll actually be able to start on the texture of the vehicle. I can only pray that this won't take as long as everything else has over the last four weeks or i'll be in SERIOUS trouble with the project progress.