3D: UV Unwrap, Baking & Texturing
UV Unwrap
After sculpting the leaf boat, I imported the low poly model into blender and tried to UV unwrapped it. I found this tutorial that showed how to UV unwrap complex object using a tool called “Seam from island” that helped me create seams from separated parts of the model that I have previously unwrapped individually. Since this is my first time trying out UV unwrapping, I don’t think this was the best result, but it’s good enough for me to import into Substance Painter and start texturing the model.
Texturing using Substance Painter
At this point I was wondering why the holes and cuts on the leaf didn’t show up in the viewport, eventhough I saw that it baked out an opacity map. Tempted by the question, I found out that the solution is to add an opacity channel and also to change the Shader Setting into PBR-metal-rough-with-alpha in order for the opacity map to appear properly.
Leaf texture references
I have decided to go with variation 2 as it matches the overall look of my UE5 scene more.