PML Coach Bus
Blando Calrissian
Posts: 616
Not certain where to post product reviews these days (Novica's old thread has gone rather quiet) so I'm guessing... here?
I picked up PML Coach Bus during a recent sale. It's nice to finally have a tourist / long distance bus in the store (Human's Globetrotter Motor Home comes close, but it's meant to be a large personal RV).
The only downside is that it's not properly UV mapped, so you can't slap your own "Smith Bus Tours" logo across the side of it without resorting to decals. The body colors are all just standard colors from the Uber surfaces panel.
Not sure if it's worth my time tinkering with it in Blender or not. I may ask for a refund.
Just wanted to let folks know in case they were picturing using the product in the same manner as me.
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Comments
Wow. That UV mapping is really bad. Thanks for the heads up.
Moved to Art Studio, or since it is reporting a technical aspect Technical Help would be arguable. Product Suggestiuons is for can you identify/in search of/would like to see threads.
The UV is not really that bad. Be aware that it uses several UVs, e.g. one for the body.
But you cant type on the bus, except for the upper part under the windows, because the lower part are seperated into different part due to the different storage rooms. It could have been kind of one surface, but it would be more complicated.
Example with just a metal shader.
And here with some text. Could have been a little larger than what I used. You have to write vertical.
The problem is that the luggage bays, quarter-panels, and mid-body stripe should have been mapped together. Instead, they're barely mapped at all (I'm not even sure they were unwrapped), and one of the luggage bays is mapped upside-down. Had it been done properly, the raised metal shader in your example would have lined up across the face, instead of having weird intersections between the front bumper, driver's window, front wheel well, etc. This is largely hidden if you are using vanilla Iray Uber shading, but with anything else it becomes obvous. The luggage bays are not treated as a separate surface, so it's not even possible to adjust tiles and image maps to blend with the main bus body.
It's not a terrible product by any means, it's just that most tour and inter-city buses I've seen have large logos (sometimes across the side windows as well) as part of their livery, and that's tricky to do here without decals and opacity maps. For an MSRP of $32 I expect better. I've put in a request for a refund on this one.
Everything is UV unwrapped, but a number of places there is double mesh, making it more diffucult to make a continous UV map over seams.
I considered if I could make a new UV unwrap where the sides were continious, but it would be to much work.
I think your best option is to use decals, but that will break the illusion if you open the luggage compartments.
It wouldn't be very efficient, but if the wrapping around the edges of the openings doesn't matter for the logo itself you could assign the should-be-continuous sections to a new surface, then do a simple cubic or planar UV projection so that thata rea was flat and continuous. Load it as a Geometry Shell, apply your logo and a transparecny mask to that using the new UVs, and it will line up even when the doors open (or Decals can use UVs, or apply your decal in whatever you model in using the new UVs, bake to a map using the existing UVs, and the result can be layered over the existing maps directly - though overlapping areas would be an issue there).