Help with long skirt UV map

[LisaMarie McWinnie]

So I recently made a custom dress that had a round skirt, and for that I saved the uv in a square shape. I didnt noticed any distortion, and was pretty happy with the results (I had never done that for skirts uv's) even though it was a pain to make every line perfectly straight.

I tried it with a project (this one up here) I've been working on lately, but the results were not that good. At first, with a rectangular-shaped uv, made the pattern (I tested with a repeated pattern)  looks big on the bottom and small near the top. I came witht he "brilliant' idea of then making it in a irregular cone shape. At first it seemed it worked, but I noticed later that the texture is also distorced horizontaly, with the front having it very wide, and the back very small.

Up here is how the uv for the skirt looks, and how the skirts looks with textures. I make historical dresses so I am always working with long skirts, and finally learning how to make UVs that will not distorce the textures would be great.

 Thank you in advance!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Morgaine Christensen]

What program are  you working in? Did you us the same UVs for both skirts? Or, did you make new  UVs from the new skirt type? 

[LisaMarie McWinnie]

I am using Blender 2.68, and I made a new UV for this skirt (its not the same skirt either, its a new one), the one shown in the second picture (I edited it so you can see it better, it was a bit too small).

[Rolig Loon]

The problem is that the faces in your UV map are not all the same width.  You have two choices. Either mess with the UV map until the faces are roughly the same width, or stretch and squish your texture until it is squished the same way the UV map is.  I don't know of an easy way to do either one, so I think you'll have to end up using Photoshop's Edit >>> Transform tool by hand until you get a pleasing result.  You can make incremental changes, save them, and use Local Textures to monitor your progress.

[LisaMarie McWinnie]

I always check how the texture looks on Blender first, so I guess that willnot be a problem.

I actualy had to change the width on the UV, it was much worst before. So I guess I'll have to continue doing it? I saw a product on marketplace, a full-perm, and the image of the uv looked so neat and simple.

But then, this skirt gets wider at the bottom, so I think a rectangular UV will not work right? This one is not working either, you can see how the texture gets distorced vertically too.

Ugh this uv is driving me mad!

[Rolig Loon]

What matters is whether your texture and the UV map are distorted in the same way.  Imagine, for example, the state of Ohio.  It's roughly a square but not quite.  You could certainly make a square map of Ohio if you wanted to, though.  You'd just have to stretch and squeeze the real map until all of its borders matched the outlines of your square.  Now, suppose that you have a satellite photo of Ohio.  If you're going to use it on your square map, you'll have to stretch and squeeze it too. The point is that there's nothing sacred about the shapes of either the map or the image.  All that matters is that they match.  Same with your UV map and your skirt texture.   If they don't match, you need to adjust one or the other until they do.  It doesn't make any difference at all whether your skirt's UV map is a rectangle or a trapezoid or whatever shape it is now.  All that counts is that your texture is squished appropriately to fit it.

[Drongle McMahon]

As I don't make clothes, you can probably ignore this. However, one of the best ways of describing a UV map is to compare it with the paper pattern used in dressmaking. The flat pieces of cloth (texture) become the 3D shape of the final garment. So it's possible that the best way to make the UV map for this would be to use just those shapes in the UV map, with the same seams, that the dressmaker would use in the paper pattern - I guess four to six pieces around the skirt, each narrower at the top. That might help with the general texture fitting. The seams would be just like the seams in the real object. It won't deal with the gathering at the waist though, or with other details that aren't in the geometry. That you would still have to do with careful texture editing or further seams and distortion of the UV map. If you want exact detail, then you could model the detail with accurate folding of the pattern pieces, texture that, then bake the texture and a normal map onto your lower poly model.

[Aquila Kytori]

Hi

Something that may help would be using a UV Grid as your image in the UV editor so that you can see how the grid is mapped to  the skirt when viewing in Texture mode and then try editing the UV map to get less stretch.

Also you can enable Stretch from the Display menu in the Properties panel in the UV editor window. It indicates using colours where the UV is stretched,  Blue indicating very little stretch to red alot of stretch .

Something else you could look into is Projection painting .