Sometimes Something Goes Wrong

When you are working on any complex development project, whether it is game development related or otherwise, sometimes things do not always go as planned.

As I converted the Evita character into an UMA model, the texture application after the mesh stitching didn't go exactly as planned. Now, obviously I did not set the torso, arms, and face textures to the iris texture for the model. This was a simple case of a UV mapping issue. UVs are coordinates which tell the shader how to map a texture to specific geometry. When the UVs are not set up properly, you get weird texture mapping issues like you see above.

Once the issue presented itself, it was time to dig into what happened. A quick inspection of the UV maps in Blender shows the issue.

The UV map here is outside the texture boundaries. The lines on the right are a depiction of the unwrapped geometry for the irises. They should fit over the image of the eyes, with the hole in the center of the geometry lining up with pupils. To fix this, you just select the UVs and move them over the image and align them properly with the texture. After fixing the UVs for each part of the body, it's a quick export and re-import into Unity, followed by a bit of a tedious process of rebuilding all the different UMA components.

Unfortunately, I can't share a video of a working animation of the character until I get some working clothes put together for her! Stay tuned for more to come.