Maps are amazing things. For years, developers having been tricking our eyes using maps. Bump maps, normal maps, opacity maps, para-awesome-llax maps, and so on. The basic idea is that by adding these maps, an artist can make an object appear to have more geometric detail than it actually does. Generally speaking a lower polygon count makes a smoother-running game.
Before I can move on to explain maps in detail, however, an object needs to be unwrapped. I find unwrapping objects about as fun and stress-free as being killed in Diablo 2, and returning to frantically run around naked amongst a hoard of monsters while trying to find all my gear again. It isn’t nice. For me, this is easily the most tedious part. It’s worse than testing. Worse than photographing walls in public and getting dodgy looks.
Imagine your model had to be unfolded piece by piece and placed in a flat square area, with each polygon facing upwards straight at you, providing a flat image that can be textured. An unwrapped box made of six polygons would look something like this:
Notice how each polygon is an even size, placed within the blue square. In contrast, the exterior of my parent’s house looks like this:
You’ve got a headache just looking at it, right? Because I have. All of the shapes outside the square I have unwrapped, the mass of green lines within the square, however, need me to select them individually, tell them which way to face, then resize each part so it’s small enough to pack within the box. Is this aspect of game development fun? No. No it isn’t. But as I’ve mentioned before, if strange, strange people are happy to photograph lamp posts and tarmac for a living, there must be someone out there with a passion for painstakingly moving lines around a screen until they fit into a little box.
Next time, at last, I promise you, the interesting and pretty part… MAPS!
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