TOE week 20: Jumping the 1 pixel gap

                The UV rays burn! I think I hate UV mapping or Blender’s UV tools or both. I worked on UV mapping a couple of times over the past few weeks that I haven’t been writing my producer e-mails. (AKA this blog.) I would look at UVs in Blender fight with them throw my hands up in despair and walk away. A friend of mine was coming over to work on my other project with me and have a dev day. He spent the day accomplishing things and my entire Saturday dev day was me know figuring out UVs. The stupid thing is that I already know how to UV things. In fact I recently UVed a hover craft racecar for a completely different project. Racecar’s are harder than squares. Like all I am trying to do is a plainer projection on the front of squares. Blender from what I have looked for on the internet for how to seems to indicate that Blender used to have planer but now uses project from view. Project from view means that the size of all of the objects is different every time I make the projection. And that sucks when you want your UVs to line up. 

                Meanwhile I’m also wrapping up my other project. It is called Ninja Zen and on the Google play store. I have described it as Tetris with Ninjas. So project TOE has been neglected because of the more relevant release. Also not going to lie but UVs have made wanting to work on this project increasingly difficult as mentioned above.

                So this week I got myself in gear and sat down with UV nonsense for a large chunk of time this week. About 4 days this week. I got all of the UVs lined up then got them into Unity fought with Shaders for reasons I’m not entirely clear on then connected all of the pieces together to see how well they all lined up. Looked at the seams adjusted them in Photoshop. Back to Unity got it mostly working. Super annoyed with one piece in particular. There was a 1 pixel gap between a straight piece and a hill piece. I tried everything I could think of to removed this gap. It basically shouldn’t be there. The UVs were right as far as I could tell. I didn’t want to mess with them as I could break them worse. Photoshop was right. I turned up the quality in Unity. No help. Checking boxes and turning all of the relative dials I could find and nothing. Still a 1 pixel gap. 

                My wife told me to quit. It isn’t a big deal. The stupid thing was, it was a BIG deal, to me. This 1 pixel gap was haunting me. The words of advice from Extra Credits ran through my mind “If you are working on something for an hour and it doesn’t go well move on figure it out later.” Good advice. Screw THAT! I joined two Facebook Unity Dev groups. Posted my problem got back three different possible answers. I tried all three and none of them worked. That is when it clicked. It wasn’t in the UVs I thought. I opened Blender and looked at the model. I snapped the two pieces together and looked at their vertexes. Sure enough they didn’t line up. They were off by something stupid like .0012. Rejiggered the vertexes a little used blender’s snap to vertex tool and opened Untiy and BAM! No more 1 pixel gap. Victory yay. Was it worth it? I don’t know.

                As far as learning how to solve problems goes it was clearly worth it. If you try everything to fix a problem and everything fails there is power in that failure. You now know that thing that you think is the problems is actually not the problem.  Knowing where the problem is, is halfway to solving it.

                   Above is the very simple squares that I UVed. Squares that were a pain!

 More complicated race car. This object was easier for me to UV.... I need to get a copy of Max or Maya.