Work.Flow.

Whew – between getting the Steam Page live and getting notification that Oculus is sending my a Rift to dev on (plus the usual family life stuff happening – my eldest is almost done with kindergarten!) I drifted sideways from the dev blog and one that I’ve been meaning to do for a bit: show a bit of how I’m getting my kids drawings into VR.

First up is a simple image that I decided would be a crystal torch prop for inside the dark and scary castle. Using photoshop I crop and knockout the background and save it as a .png for loading into Inkscape and for texturing my 3D mesh.

In Inkscape, I use the tool to trace out the object and adjust the points as needed – I try to avoid the bezier handles, as they add too many verts (and when extruded, too many faces) in Blender.  Once it looks good, I save it as an .svg to import into Blender.

In Blender, I import the .svg, scale it up a bit so it imports into Unity with minimal resizing. By pressing alt+c, I convert it from a curve to a mesh object. In edit mode, I try to reduce the vertex count as much as possible to avoid adding too many faces when the object is extruded (select all the verts, press ‘E’ the ‘Z’ to extrude on the Z axis) From there, its simple to ctrl+f and fill the verts with faces. By selecting the verts on the other side and doing the same, I get a solid object I can put in my game.

From there its a simple matter of using Smart UV to unwrap the mesh – typically I can take the large sides and line up their UV coordinates to save space on my texture map. From there I make a new image, jump back to default mode and add material and texture slots and add the new image I just made and give it a quick coat of white to see where my UVs are and place the texture on the right spot back in Photoshop:

Using the transform tools, its easy to get the texture into place and use a bit of cloning to fix any bare spots or errors. From there the image’ll be saved and back in Blender you can update what is being worked on by hitting ‘reload image’ in the UV editor. Once everything is looking spiffy, I export it out as a .fbx and load it into Unity and check it out in game.

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