TOE week 27: Serendipitous Deletion

Last week I said that I was going to have to do the whole UVs thing over again. Well I was wrong. I had to do it over again four times. Fortunately I now have this particular process down to a science. The first time I did it I learned that you need to use the straighten tool in blender. The straighten tool in blender sucks and makes me miss XSI. I don’t remember it being terrible in Maya either. You right click on the UVs you want to straighten and say straighten x or straighten y. They have this in blender but it actually does nothing. Looking it up on the various forums you have to do something entirely different to straighten UVs. Maybe it isn’t UVs I hate maybe it is Blender’s UVs. 

I finished attempt 1 and import it into Unity and it doesn’t really work. Like the test texture I made doesn’t line up. I worked on it for a bit but it seemed remarkable uncooperative. I gave up on attempt 1 and moved onto attempt 2 and had very similar problems. While I’m busy failing at this I am also learning what is going wrong. I quickly discover that attempt 2 will also not work. Ok attempt 3! I made everything over again and it kind of mostly works! It isn’t perfect. I put on the test texture and there are some problems but they don’t have to be fixed in the model. Okay bring it into Unity. Then back to Blender to break it into different pieces. 

For my collision I have a master file of all of the different collision pieces. This makes UVing much easier as in Blender you can’t see UVs on two different objects at the same time. Then I save them as different pieces and delete the remaining bits. Well if you guessed that at around 10pm I was too tired to properly handle this task then you would be one hundred percent correct. So if anyone had: ‘deleted the bulk of the collision in the master file and saved it’ in your office pool then you get a cookie. I was shell shocked and kind of pissed but it was done there was no ctrl Z for this one. I thought about how I could fix this… Source control software, I should put this on git hub and things like this can’t happen! It wouldn’t fix the current issue but it could prevent future problems. I considered just using the model I made last week it worked even if it had its own problems. Then I did the smart thing. I closed the computer and played Gears of War for an hour and went to bed.

I woke up the next morning in a fog. But it was fog of UVs, like I was in the zone! I stumbled around the house as one does when getting up early and I kind of stopped when it basically hit me. I could see the most perfect layout. My wife asked me what I was doing because I was just standing in the room probably picturing squares in my mind. I told her that I was thinking about UVs.

It was 7:40 and at 8:00 I had to get my son up for baby class. So I had 20 minutes. I worked on the 3D model and my son woke up 10 minutes early. We then went to baby class. When I got back I finished the model and UVs. Then I saved two copies of this file… Didn’t want to lose it. Broke it into pieces got it into Unity and then I had a Rainbow Bridge that connected with all pieces without any graphical errors. Also in my old UV layout you couldn’t tell where the edge of the foreground and background actually met. In this new version it is completely obvious. 

So what did I do this week? I built a rainbow bridge through failure.