UVs for procedural corals

[hmihalis1]

Hi there, 

I'm making some proecural corals for a game engine situation using VDB advection: 

so of course the highpoly models need to be reduced and have normals and height etc maps baked, but i'm having a bit of a nightmare trying to find a auto UV solution that can create Uvs that don't contain errors, see below a baked AO texture resulting from auto UVs, the errors are even more noticeable on the normals channel: 

  

Could anyone advise me on what settings to try in the autoUV SOP? I'm currently using the UV autoseam, I tried cluster but its just crashing my machine. It doesn't matter if it takes an hour+ to generate the UVs for each coral, or should I just abandon trying to autoUV shapes this organic and weird? UV maps are always very confusing for me. 

 

Any help at this time is hugely appreciated, 

 

H

 

[AslakKS]

Just an idea. It might help if you dilate the vdb, smooth the vdb then try to auto uv -> project it back onto the coral to bake out your maps.

[hmihalis1]

Thanks @AslakKS, do you mean to smooth the low poly VDB? should I try to make it slightly bigger than the highpoly one? 

 

[AslakKS]

Yeah. Basically, just dilate it out so that you can use the ray sop to project it back when you got acceptable UVs.

Auto uv set to cluster with a low number of cluster has worked well for me in the past. 

Might also slice up your mesh and the UVs one piece at a time.

[hmihalis1]

amazing thanks so much - i'll give it go