Evaluative Blog Week 7: Burnout

The current week overall has been considered one of my least productive, with the first half of the Assignment handed in i feel that the week after is always a 'Burnout Stage' of the semester, where people relax momentarily before returning to the next point of Order.

Remember those Planes

With a fourth Model still waiting to be done i found myself paying more attention to the environments and cockpits of the Star Destroyer scenes on the ITV1 Star Wars Marathon (ending this Weekend with Return of the Jedi), however i do need to get around doing it.
During the tutorial i caught up on some exercises through the notes; i ignored mapping Planes via Bitmap as the skill has been shown within the assignment models by mapping the Schematics as an in-world reference while modelling. The exercise i did choose to do (as i also did the other options of Planar Mapping but i have no images to prove it) was the use of UVW Mapping, showing the different kind of Maps using different primitives and mappings.

Scaling the box made little difference

The first Map was a Box Map on a Sphere (instead of the Moth Bitmap i textured with the Tie Fighter Wing instead). The mapping was simple enough, it mapped 6 versions of the bitmap onto the sphere at equal size, i found it similar to Planar mapping, but that's mainly because a Box is made of Multiple Planes.

Sphere Mapping

Shrink Wrap Mapping

Next was a simplistic Sphere Mapping onto a Sphere. The Map itself wrapped itself around the sphere as a whole Texture, no repeats like a Box Map, when the Gizmo moved the map moved with it but remained textured onto the shape in a loop. This was to be compared with Shrink Wrap Mapping, whereby the gizmo was also a Sphere. In contrast to a Sphere Map, the Shrink Wrap stretched the texture depending on the movement of the Gizmo, as seen on the image. Personally i feel the Shrink Wrap mapping is only good if you need to stretch the texture a little, else it would be wiser to texture via Sphere.

With Cap

The next comparison involved Cylinder Mapping on Cylinders. The first Map required the 'Cap' Checkbox to be ticked. As seen on the image, the Capped Texture would move the side faces of the Cylinder but not the top and bottom face, you'd also recognise that the cylinder has mapped the texture more than once (mainly because it is unwrapped to make 2 circles and a rectangle). Comparing this to the uncapped version and the primitive is mapped as a Whole, trying to keep the single image onto the entire Cylinder, which as you can see is quite messy and probably not recommended, especially for a cylinder with a texture that size (and little white space).

Without Cap

Face Mapping a Teapot became straightforward, it completely wrapped the primitive with a tiled version of the texture, i'd suggest this is only recommended for color patterns and not complete detail, the map is also fixed so it cannot be altered or moved.

taking things at Face Value

The real difficulty came with trying to map the image onto another teapot while keeping the bottom clear. After many attempts i was forced to ask my tutor for the solution, he said to try the Moth, as it had more White Area to it. Despite having to ask again, the solution was found by moving and scaling a Sphere Map, using the white area to an advantage so the Image didn't completely wrap itself around the primitive.

It didn't cross my mind for the Sphere
to be the Answer

The final Task was making the image show up on only 2 opposing faces of a Box; although i think i did it in a different way, the way i did succeed was by ticking the 'Vertex Color Channel' tickbox - something i discovered when trying to find out the solution to the previous task. The tickbox, like face mapping, cannot be altered or moved but still completes the task at hand.

It's a nice moth, but my Tie Fighter's a better Texture anyway

Overall it is still evident that there is much to do, especially with the absence of this week's lecture. However, it is only a matter of keeping our heads down and getting down with the work that we can reach the aims we need to reach.