[SOLVED] Strange Rips/Tears in Mesh Weren't there before!

kitkat Thank you very much! It seems so obvious and simple now that you explain it this way lol. I had to laugh at how much time I spent mapping and re-mapping these little puzzle pieces into place so that the uv grid matched up but then still didn't work in game/s4studio. I wasn't even going out of my way to do things the hard way as usual this was me just selecting the whole joined mesh, clicking mark seam, and unwrapping en mass instead of being specific about it which is obviously why I wound up with a mess. I've learned a lot though and you helped immensely in that so thank you very much!!

I am getting some strange projections on the map side when I mark the seams as you did though. Not sure why I'm not getting the same map you are. After marking the seam did you just select "Unwrap" or did you use one of the other options? I did try "Smart UV Projection" which I find makes nice neat maps but some of the pieces did not seem to be attached to anything in 3D view window I saw nothing "moving" for lack of better way to describe. Obviously we have to wiggle things around to figure out what maps what so we know where to put colours/textures but when I did smart uv projection pieces of the map seemed unaccounted for.



If this is how it has to be I don't mind too much but I like things to be neat and separate and I hate that that one really big semi-circle at the bottom left is attached to the circle.

I think I did it the way I did because I read somewhere that the pieces can't overlap in any way so I went overboard keeping them separate. I didn't even think of the spaces IN BETWEEN causing artifacts ugh!!

Happy it helped UV mapping is a giant pain, lol. I just used the "unwrap" option. I don't really understand how "smart uv" works. I generally use unwrap (or "project from view" in ortho on individual parts if I don't like the overall "unwrap" result). The main difference I see is that you've marked seams to separate out the little beveled edges. I mapped them as part of the circular plane since the angle difference is so slight. So, just a seam on the bottoms of the bevels instead of top and bottom. (and remember to remove the little seam between the bevel faces if you want it all stay connected)

You definitely don't want parts of your map overlapping, but you do want adjacent bits of the same geometries (like your cylinders) to touch and line up if they will be taking the same texture.

I also forgot to add that I mapped the light bulb filament using "project from view" in front ortho view. Since it's so small and thin, that should work fine.

Project from view only shows the side you see in the mesh window. In ortho view (which is a dead-on view, unlike user perspective), you can select just the faces you can see from that view and map them. You can do this from all views (on your numpad: 1 - front ortho, ctrl+1 - back, 3 - right, ctrl+3 - left, 7 - top, Ctrl+7 - bottom). If you don't zoom in or out all all while doing this, everything will be mapped to the same scale. It's most useful when you have flat planes or sides to map. It's a handy kind of shortcut when marking seams is cumbersome. [Sometimes my brain does seams well, and some days I just can't picture where they need to go to get the best unwrapping  ]

Texturing and modeling are way more fun to me than mapping! Mapping is a necessary evil. It does get better with practice. I'm not an expert by any means, but I'm getting much better at it. It gets a lot more manageable once you learn some of the hot keys and little tricks to it.

I think bringing it out of S4S is just making the polys visible. Your mesh has polys (shown as the number of tris [triangles] on the blender menu bar) even though they don't show unless you do the triangulate modifer on your mesh. Your lamp looks fine in game.



(The screen shot is from one of my meshes. Yours actually has 798 tris/polys)

Aaah ok I see I was so annoyed at this even though I'd read already in the past that games like to work with triangles. I didn't think about the program actually converting the quads to tris during the import mesh process. I will have to keep that in mind while modeling in the future then. I hate running modifiers like decimate and triangulate I find they always ruin my work lol Oh well. Again thank you guys for your patience and help!

I had a bit of a temper tantrum and took a few days break over this haha! Oh man.

Edit: The weird thing is my game still shows them. I've noticed however, that there are tears like this all over the place if I look close enough. I was playing TS3 and there are lot tears everywhere. Even in my TS4 save now I can see them on sims faces if I get in close. I don't know what it is but I don't think i can fix this :/ I have a good graphics card too a GTX 1070 so I don't get it