Not-exactly-maps

Not Exactly Maps - using Radiant to create models.
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Radiant is just a tool, an empty canvas with which to create anything. It's inarguably for "Quake maps", but these maps are inarguably also just textured triangles. It's very possible to use Radiant for things that are not considered maps, as a map is only truly defined by its concept as an environment and the way many materials are used mapped to world-space and unwrapped into overlapping obscurities inconsequentially. This really means that the main concern with this is texture unwrapping and how many materials are used, which suddenly sounds obviously more like a model.

Radiant is extremely useful for creating new materials by baking them from brushwork and existing materials used and combined in new ways. Some of our oldest materials were created this way, although not many, the intention has always been to do more of this. It's actually a core technique of the articulation philosophy. By virtue of everything being baked already having full materials to use, new material generation becomes very straight-forward and feasible, and the geometry can be used to easily isolate areas requiring editing as an image later. Geometry and the normalmaps assigned and mapped to them coordinate within the baking process to combine into new normalmap information derived from both. The geometry can be millions of triangles and because everything is baked, the number of materials and unwrapping of them is also of no consequence. A prime example but only the beginning.

These days we're more capable of fixing and outright unwrapping geometry in a way that is useable in real-time production assets, mostly. We can also automatically (to an extent) clean geometry and isolate then manipulate trouble areas by using logic rather than labour. Textures can be baked in ways that are much cleaner and baking at extremely high resolutions can result in a quality perfectly fine for production assets. All of this means that Radiant suddenly has a lot more potential to create things like vehicles and machines, pickup items, character accoutrements and weapons, even "v-weps" at high-detail as seen in first-person.

In attempting to use Radiant for modelling purposes, the challenge comes from how to organise your brushwork in such a way that logical unwrapping can easily occur, mostly automatically, and the best way to do this is viewport-mapping, ordering the basics, and offsetting geometry to match the offsets of an unwrap channel. With all of these in mind from the beginning, and a whole basket of tricks later in the process, what you create stands the best chance of becoming a useable production asset from a technical concern.

Using a viewport or camera to map texture coordinates is not only a good technique for quickly getting decent islands, it's also necessary to bind the same geometric features to the whole unwrap in place, which saves a huge amount of space and thus requires smaller textures for higher texel resolution. This makes all the difference in the world and is an outright dealbreaker if to not use this approach.

Ordering the basics is exactly like isolating your basics for mapping an environment, except it needs to be much more brutal now as unwrapping real-estate is at a premium and no arbitrary overlapping is acceptable. It's simply impossible to do all of this automatically and avoid redundancy in the unwrapping with repetitions, so it's vital to order at least half of all geometry from largest surface area and below, doing so in several iterations. If unordered geometry has a tiny surface area then the impact on unwrap real-estate becomes minimal to negligible, so as long as the geometry with the largest surface area is ordered this way, there shouldn't be any problems.

Finally, by physically offsetting the geometry in Radiant, Blender will be able to map those world coordinates in the unwrapping, allowing a way for organisation of the entire unwrap from within Radiant, resulting in a more logical layout without very much manual adjustment in Blender's UV editor. When combined with ordering the basics, this makes it possible to have an unwrap for everything that is very acceptable, although not perfect, to still be used as a final production asset and a true model in a technical sense.

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