Last I left off, a very long post ago, I had the UVs created for each object in my scene. I have done a little more house keeping work.
Each object had its own UV layout and when you brought up the editor that was all you saw. Now I could work with this but it could be pretty tedious. Ideally, I would have as few UV layouts as possible so that there was less to deal with. So I created selection groups.
One group for the pencil and its pencil line and another group for the pen and its ink line.
Selection groups are a little different than groups. With a group, if you want to edit a single piece of it you have to first open the group before you can select the individual component to change. With selection groups, that is not the case. It is more like a soft selection of items that will let you apply a modifier or a UV to it.
For each item I selected it and collapsed its Unwrap UVW modifier so that it became part of the object. Then I used the selection group and applied an Unwrap UVW modifier to the whole group. When I opened the editor all the UVs were in one layout window. This way I could better group them all together for exporting to Photoshop and painting in the texture.
When I was working on the UVs I made a point to, once I had it the way I wanted it, for the most part move the layouts outside of the zero to one space. That’s the checkered area in this picture of the UV editor for the pencil selection group. I did this because I knew I was going to be putting the UV layouts together in groups and if I left them all in the zero to one space they could end up stacked on top of each other and difficult to move apart.
For the pencil selection group, it was fairly easy to get all the UVs in the space. And I turned off the checkered background because it made it hard to see things. Once everything was packed into the zero to one space I rendered the UV layout out to a bitmap file so I can take it into Photoshop to work with it.
Setting up the UV layout for the pen selection group took a little more work. There are many more pieces in that group and they all had to fit that same small space, as you can see here in this screen capture.
I had pieces all over and of varying sizes. I had to scale them down first to fit things in the space. Once they were all in the space then I packed them in a bit tighter so that I could then scale everything up just a little to make better use of the space and make it easier to create the textures. Once that was done I rendered this layout to a bitmap as well.
Here is the packed UV layout for the pencil selection group.
Here is the packed UV layout for the pen selection group.
Yes, I think it may be a bit interesting trying to do the textures for these in Photoshop. For some parts I think I will be doing some extreme zooming in.