TurboSquid customers have long expected to know the underlying constructions of models before they buy them. Understanding how a model has it’s texture maps and shaders applied through its UVs is vitally important if a customer wants to fine-tune or tweak your model’s materials for their production needs. Customers may have a bad experience and you may face potential refunds if a model doesn’t have UVs or if the UVs are set up in a way that doesn’t make it easy to edit the materials and textures that are already applied. Neither you nor TurboSquid wants to issue refunds, so it’s important that you properly describe your UV setup.
During the publishing process we require that the artist provides information on how they’ve set up the UVs on their model so that potential customers can make an informed buying decision. When it comes to Unwrapped UVs (which is popular among our customers), it is important to state exactly how the unwrapping has been done.
As you can see from the screenshot, there are five total UV options. It is important to understand what each one means, as well as which ones you need to select.
For CheckMate Pro (3.1.2) Certification, you must provide at least one image of the unwrapped UVs. While CheckMate Lite has no UV requirements, you should still properly label your UVs to help customers understand what they are buying.
- Unknown: This is a purely legacy option that you should never select. Unknown is used only as a placeholder for very old models that were published when this piece of metadata was first introduced.
- Yes, non-overlapping: You should select this option if you’re submitting for CheckMate Pro and your model has been unwrapped in a way that no UV islands/shells overlap with one another. This type of unwrapped UV layout provides the customer with the most flexibility to modify your model.
Unwrapped UVs (Model by MINH_DA)
- Yes, overlapping: You should select this option if you’re submitting for CheckMate Pro and your model has been unwrapped in a way that one or more sets of UV islands/shells overlap with one another. This kind of Unwrapped UV layout is more common with models that contain repeating textures or are designed for realtime experiences where texture space is set at a premium and it’s easier to mirror the UVs for a symmetrical object from one side to the other.
Overlapping UVs (Model by 3DMMO)
- Mixed: You should select this option if you’re submitting for CheckMate Pro and your model has any combination of unwrapped UVs, procedural automatic mapping (such as simple planar, cylindrical or spherical mapping) and elements with no UVs at all. This option lets a customer know that there is likely some amount of re-UVing work that they must do once they buy your model.
- No: Selecting this option means that you have not provided any unwrapped UVs for your work at all, and that it’s either not UV mapped at all or all of the mapping has been generated procedurally via options like simple planar, cylindrical or spherical mapping.
- CheckMate Pro Specification Point: 3.1.6
