TOE week 26: Battling UVs and winning maybe?

It was finally time for me to open up Blender and begin work on the ground collision system. I had been avoiding this because of how tedious it was last time but I was determined. I sat down. I opened blender and I tried to open the file menu…. But everything was running SO slowly. Wat? I restarted my computer and opened blender and the basic scene with a cube was TANKING my machine. I opened Unity and it was fine. I scrolled around and panned like the solid state memory I now know and love. Something weird was going on with Blender. But why was this happening NOW, when I was finally motivated/the last item on the to do list. 

I won’t bore you all any longer, long story short Blender doesn’t like the update for my video card. An update that happened on February 10^th. Thanks Nvidia. Lots of people said that you had to roll back your video diver and I didn’t really want to do that. Also this is not the best solution. If you right click on Blender you can set your graphics processor to: Integrated Graphics instead of letting Nvidia handle it and then Blender once again ran properly. Finally now time to get to work!

Working with UVs is like battling evil in another dimension. Like you're in the UV dimension. The last time UVs and I faced off in Blender it was not pixel perfect. So I worked on other things and pondered just how I was going to tackle this really annoying problem. I came up with a system where there would be converter pieces on each side of the rectangle. I can delete these pieces to use the middle to extend the rectangle and the middle texture should tile with itself. Allow me to demonstrate.

Then I used my gained knowledge of Blender to create a UV projection and prevented me from having to all of the tedious hard work that made me want to throw my hands up and quit, or con a friend with a copy of Maya to do it for me. One Alanis Morissette song later and doing it this way seems to have actually solved the problem of it not being pixel prefect without the need of a converter piece…. LEARNING YAY! I think next week I am going to do the whole thing over again! Now that is PROGRESS! Anyway this is what it looks like in game. This is test art but you get the idea.