welcome back Alex wood analytical
graphics at Mackay also analytical
graphics and we're continuing on the
modeling of the PBR material for the
solar cells last time we left off we
notice that we have a little bit of a
repeating texture there kind of our
solar cells are a little too uniform and
you know and if you can pull up the UV
map for this you can kind of see we have
all of our geometry stacked on this tiny
little island and the rest of that
texture Atlas is wasted space so if if
we're happy with how the solar cells
look that's great we can actually reduce
our texture Maps just crop out that
little area we're using and save a lot
of space so that's one approach the
other thing that we're going to show now
is we're gonna do some unwrapping yeah
I'm gonna unwrap these UV coordinates
and we're gonna try and get the spread
out a little bit so I'm gonna hit I'm in
the UV editor I'm gonna hit the letter U
and we're gonna do smart UV project this
thing is not always as smart as it
claims to be but there are a few
settings that I like to change one is
the island margin that is the space
between the UV islands and you'll see
that a little bit later and I always use
point o2 it just seems to work for me
and the other is stretch I don't want it
stretching these UV Islands so I'm just
gonna let it go like that I'm gonna hit
okay and what it's done it's taken each
of these little solar cells and given it
its own unique location in the UV map I
can see some variation now yes we can
see some variation we can also see there
they're not aligned to anything and it's
hard for us to tell that on this color
map I'm going to switch over to I think
the roughness map might be a good one
actually I could also switch to the
normal map yeah
so the normal map sort of shows us the
shape of where these things are and
they're all sideways and if you remember
from the color map that the direction
does matter because the horizontal lines
are very thin and the vertical lines are
very pronounced
so I I do care about getting them the
right way visually I mean obviously
these are mm not the same as a as the
actual solar cell from our original
reference image we're taking a bit of
artistic license by adding this much
detail to them but we want them to look
cool so I'm going to rotate these around
the 2d cursor which is in the corner of
my map here I'm going to type our 90
enter and then I'm gonna hit G for grab
y1 enter
so I've rotated them all 90 degrees and
that will get them all lined up more or
less the right way except for this one
apparently which is upside down for
unknown reasons so I'm gonna hit the I'm
gonna hit UV selection mode and pick the
offending guy here and our 180 him
whoops escape that I was not right he
should not rotate about the cursor he
just needs to rotate about its own
bounding box enter okay looks like
they're all right side up if I can see
that correctly so let us go back to the
2d cursor and I'm gonna do a little
scaling on the x-axis and I'm gonna do a
little scaling on the y-axis just really
the U and V axes but expects and Y are
the keys I'm using and then I'm gonna go
up to one of these more distant ones and
we'll fine-tune our X scaling and we'll
our Y scaling doesn't need much
fine-tuning does it so these are looking
okay but you'll notice that where we're
getting these top corners clipped off a
little bit and that's not what I want so
I'm going to do a different type of
scaling on these I'm gonna go to the
individual origins scaling and when I do
individual origins I can actually scale
them all individually like this
so what I would like to do actually
scale them all on the y-axis more or
less like that and then gy to move them
on Y I'm gonna try and line them up here
at the bottom scale Y of Y yeah so I've
wanted to get this bottom edge because I
think it there's some visual interest
there and each one of these seems to
have more or less landed on one now take
a look these ones on the top landed
outside my range but that's okay for an
image like this where we we started with
a repeating texture that we downloaded
the it's okay if things stick off the
top stick off the side it's gonna make
use of that repeating portion we don't
need to use it but it's safe to do it
and that's in contrast to the the other
workflow which we'll show in another
video where you create these UV islands
first and then you create the image for
the islands when you're doing it in that
order it's very bad to have stuff stick
off the top and stick off the sides and
overlap because then if you try and bake
something you can't bake outside the
image you don't want multiple things
baking over top of itself so you would
avoid that if you're using that workflow
but we're not using that on the solar
panels here so it's okay the other thing
I think I'll show is that earlier Alex
mentioned there was some smudging I
think that was you that mentioned this
budging and I think we want to try and
capture some of that because we have you
know if if you take some artistic
license and get a little bit of
imperfections here and there it actually
adds quite a bit of visual interest it
draws people in right so yes so those
smudges are very common for solar panels
that come out of clean rooms right sure
I'm sure that they're in there eating
their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
and getting action what's all over these
panels yes lots of whoopsies yes
right but the point here is it gives us
an opportunity to cut to show how some
of these other properties how when you
just tune the metalness just a little
bit you can see those artifacts clearly
in the in the actual rendered model yeah
let's look at the roughness channel some
some of these are actually scratched in
addition to the smudges and I'm actually
going to take these top ones and we'll
bring them down here just so they're not
oh yeah definitely that one mm-hmm yep
little pencil eraser mark on that panel
sweet all right so we we placed all
these things individually and now if we
go back to our shading there we go what
we should see now and maybe I can make
this bigger is that each one of these
panels is a little bit different from
all of its neighbors and this is gonna
add just a little bit more visual
interest now is it possible to select
these faces from the UV map and then
view though to find like an offending
yes like if there's a particular it
affects where we're looking too it's a
little rock down yes so let's let me
back to object mode and get the stuff
sri selected into edit mode to find like
we wanted to find which one had that big
scratch on it right or the smudge on it
oh there that's our smudgy one there so
I'm gonna go into face select mode in
edit mode
I'm also going to go into the matching
say select mode in UV map mode and then
I can hit synchronize and once they're
synchronized then I can select this one
here and then hit Auto zoom it should
automatically zoom in on our
corresponding panel
and I'm gonna turn off that synchronize
because I I don't like to always use
that but but this panel here that we
zoomed in on should be the one that has
the sort of the extra smudge enos to it
that the ones around it don't have I
don't know how a parent it is
we could try adding an extra light
source and my light is too far away but
you can you can get the idea that that
some of these are not the same as as the
ones around yeah those smudge is
actually blending a little bit with the
facets on these panels they do and we
don't want the smudges to stand out we
just want to add sort of that that
subtle hint of things are different and
it's not just a repeating texture map
over and over were actually seeing
different individually made cells here
even though the real cells obviously
were done in an actual cleanroom where
people were not eating their peanut
butter and jelly sandwiches and they
probably had a much higher quality
result than I did but there there you
have adding just a little bit of visual
interest making the most out of your
texture Maps make the most out of your
texture maps and definitely get them
into a state where you're you're trying
to make better use of the real estate on
the on the UV map and not just getting
all of your texture from just one spot
on the map all right thanks ed there you
have it
you