Day 18 – GTF Achilles Part IV

12/18/2020 – Was out of commission for the vast majority of yesterday so I didn’t get as much done this week as I wanted. Nevertheless, the direct fire weapons have been modeled and placed onto the model, and I remodeled the older missile models. There wasn’t really anything wrong with the older missiles, they were just fairly poly intensive for details that could be easily implemented with Substance painter. I also modeled up a heavy anti-ship missile and used a more intelligent technique to unwrap the fighter.

On the previous SF Shahraba project I manually unwrapped the ship. While discussing it with other Freespace fans, they mentioned my hand packing of the ship was not as efficient and that for any modern texturing process using Substance, I’d need a tool to automatically unwrap it. Something I’ve been doing on this current project is whipping up quick p3d models that nonetheless have efficient texture mapping. Today I realized the method I’d been using for automatic unwrapping was highly inefficient: I was mirroring the fighter, then telling Maya to automatically unwrap and pack everything. This resulted in no stacked identical details, so the top of both wings had to share the same texture sheet. This time I reversed the steps: I unwrapped everything, arranged the pieces, then mirrored the symmetrical details. The results speak for themselves in the p3d model linked below: the texture detail around the gun muzzles and on the deferred lighting in particular is a lot better quality. Since I haven’t split the fuselage in half nor the belly gunpod, it’s not quite double quality – but it’s a huge improvement. Click the render below to go to the p3d file to check it out.