Well, as you have pointed out, there is the issue of ease-of-maintenance. Having part of the fuselage in texture A, part of it in texture B, and the rest of it in texture C won't make the life of the textuer any easier. For me, there is also the issue of ease-of-creation: arranging components into a perfect square then apply UV map is called unwrapping. In my opinion, it is one of the most demanding jobs as well as one of the most boring job there is involving modelling. The only time that I have done unwrapping was when I was applying UV map to the wings and the vertical tail plane. At that time, I was more concern with fitting everything as tightly together as possible than fitting everything into a perfect square. That is why many textures came out to be rectangular.
If one is really concern about performance, he/she can always resize the textures to perfect squares themselves. But if you ask me, I doubt doing that will make much of a difference. Regards, Ampere On July 19, 2004 12:36 pm, Chris Metzler wrote: > On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 03:45:43 -0400 > > "Ampere K. Hardraade" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > ...code last weekend, and did this: > > http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~cs233144/PROTOTYPE.jpg > > this: > > http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~cs233144/FINNAIR.jpg > > and this: > > http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~cs233144/KLM.jpg > > Cool. > > I have what's probably a dumb question; but I'm still very much new to > the graphics work. > > You use different textures for the different components of the aircraft. > Going that way, coming up with a different paint job for the aircraft > consists of replacing those files as needed; and the physical placement > of the graphics within the pixel boundaries of the file is fairly > straightforward. However, I've been told by a number of people that > graphics performance is better if perfectly square textures are used, > which is why people merge multiple images into one square texture and > use e.g. UV mapping in Blender to assign different portions of the > texture to different faces of the 3D model. What I'm wondering is > how that would be implemented for making new liveries. > > For example, the 737 currently comes with a United paint job. Say I > wanted to create a US Air paint job for it. Naively, what I *think* > I'd have to do at this point is to create images of the textures to > apply to the different parts of the US Air aircraft; then create one > square image file of the same dimensions as the United texture; then > cut and paste the different images for different parts of the aircraft > into the square texture, at *exactly* the same locations that they're > positioned in the United texture (so that the face-texture mapping > that was done with the original United texture will also work with the > US Air texture). I have no idea how the latter step gets done accurately; > but the alternatives, it seems to me, are to either use a different > 3D model file (redoing the face-texture assignment with the new texture), > which defeats the whole point of the Texture-Path; or to do as you've > done, with different non-square image files for different parts of the > aircraft. > > I'm sure I'm missing something that would be obvious to someone who's more > experienced at this than I am. Can someone clue me in? > > Thanks muchly. > > -c _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
