10 Essential UV Tips and Tricks | Blender Tutorial

ten essential tricks that could save you hours of work let's take 40 seconds to describe what you visa and what unwrapping is in 3d space you have X Y & Z to describe where things are while in 2d texture space those x and y axes usually get referred to as U and V but really we all know it's still just X&Y even says so in the proxy sidebar of the UV image editor simply bought UV is adjust position saying what faces of the object should have what part of the texture unwrap in is the process of laying out our 3d geometry into that 2d space when laying everything out flat we're simply trying to use as fewer cuts as possible with the least amount of stretching as possible while balancing that with trying not to have much empty wasted space on the texture basically like the sort of paper craft templates you might find in a program like pepakura designer by the way there is also an export paper craft model add-on for blender the first tip is an easy one where it's easy to miss and it's not on by default and that's generated UVs what you need to remember is at the moment you create an object and only at the moment you create an object you have your toolbox you can see at the bottom of the tool shell or you can hit f6 and you'll get that construction info at the location of the cursor almost all of the mesh objects have a little option for generate UVs in version 2.78 all except torus and suzanne the monkey in blender 2.79 they all now have UVs and the generated sphere you've ease from 2.78 left a little to be desired now they're way more useful in fact these are especially useful for using when baking out plant textures you may remember the cycles baking chapter to give you some way faster renders for heavy procedural materials to be able to bake you need a texture and some UVs to bake to four planets this is a really easy way to get UVs onto a sphere just select the generated UV checkbox let's get deep into the UV weeds and some fundamentals on how UVs are actually handled within blender so there's two major ways we can think about our approach and that's to use seams or not so I have this cube with all six faces selected and we can see there aren't any UVs so with our cursor in the 3d view let's press u to bring the file UV mapping menu and then let's just select the top option on and now we have some movies you do appear to be all stacked on top of each other at the moment though so let's go ctrl P to pack them into a unique space on the map and let's just increase our margin slightly so we can really see some separation there so that's a reasonable result for what we have there's not exactly any stretching on either of these phases but there is basically a seam on every single edge now even though we didn't actually input any seams into it in the first place now if you have a fairly complicated object and you don't really know where you want your seams then what we could try first instead is maybe press you and then try a smart UV project we have some options here to kind of finesse the process there but I'll set this at default values apart from just give me Island margin a little bit extra and then click OK and exhibit the same result now if we were happy with that we could come down to our UVs menu and choose to go seams from Islands and if we just deselect everything with a you can see we have all these red lines now on our mesh which is showing us where our seams are so this is how we can kind of combine using seams and not using seams but there's not really very much point in doing it on this cube like this so let's select them all with the a key go ctrl a this time to bring by our edges menu and we can clear the seam from here as well something that we can also do is try coming over to the tool shelf and selecting shading UVs and see you have a little UV set of tools here and now let's try unwrapping this cube a little bit more cleanly or efficiently since with more scenes there's more chance of having some sort of texture issues a little bit later down the line and also if we were taking this into a game the more seams that we have the basically the more memory that this object is taking up and it's not really as efficient as it could be so let's go ctrl tab to bring up our mesh select mode select our edges select this edge this edge and this edge for starters and then just imagine that we're taking some scissors and we're basically cutting through it there and allowing blender to layout the 3d geometry flat whilst taking those seams into consideration so let's go ctrl e and mark seam or of course it's used this mark seen from the tool shelf let's select everything with a and then press you and now unwrapped now again it's done a reasonable job but as you can see the size of this face down here is not really going to be very high resolution on this texture compared to the amount of space that the other faces are being given so let's make a few more cuts or seams as it were so let's come down to the options tap this time and what I'd like to do is just do some live on rap in that way I don't have to keep pressing you and then unwrap as soon as we mark a seam it will unwrap it for us so let's maybe go ctrl tab switch to edge select mode select this edge and shifts like this edge let's go ctrl e and maxeen now we have this kind of thing let's now grab this edge control e mark seam and this edge control e mark scene and that's starting to look pretty good let's grab this edge press V to try and stitch press ENTER and then let's grab this edge here press V and then enter to stitch that and then let's select them all and then go ctrl P so you just pack them in and then let's reduce our margin just so it uses as much space as it can so there's some fundamental UV unwrapping ideas within blender but this is just on a cube this is kind of easy stuff so let's tap back into object mode so that we can delete it with the X key go shift a and let's add a more interesting object into the scene with our monkey let's tap it to it edit mode press U and now let's see what happens when we go unwrap now with no seams whatsoever well we have something interesting the two eyes have shown up there and then believe it or not but this over here is an ear this over here is an ear that's the mouth that's an eye socket and this is the other eye socket so the reason I know that is because I've done this before and it for some reason tickles me but anyway this brings us to another way in which we can work with UVs which is the way that we're going to visualize them so we can work with them like this so whatever parts of this mesh we have selected we get to see the UVs in the UV image editor but sometimes if we're looking at the whole UV map so let's press a to select everything and we're kind of curious as to what maybe those faces belong to exactly where they are on the mesh it's kind of hard to work that out so we have this other option down here which is to keep UV and edit mode mesh selection in sync when we do that it doesn't matter that we have everything selected anymore so we can p select everything with a we still get to see our UV now if we select these faces here we could say they actually correspond to just above the eye there and it also helps to expose just how bizarre that unwrapping catcher is so what we can do is we can select everything with a and press U and then instead probably best to start with something like smart UV project so let's go okay and while that's not great it does give us a little bit of a place to start and potentially depending on how important this object is that might be good enough for the unwrap this does give us a chance to discuss a little bit of a limitation with are keeping the mesh and the UVs within sync here and that's if we go ctrl tab and select our vertices for example this vertex and this vertex and let's say we thought to ourselves well we want all of these vertices in fact all those UVs there to be nice and straight so what we can do is press s and then X and we have a problem since the vertices we have selected have UVs that belong in multiple UV Islands so if we go ctrl L to select our link you see where we get another issue as well which is the Select linked only works in the face select mode so just a deal with this kind of thing you're going to need to switch to face select mode shift select them all or select one and then go ctrl L do you select the linked now that we're in face select mode ctrl L to select linked actually works isolate them or in other words just hide everything else so shift H and now what we can do is control tab go back to our vertex select mode press a to deselect everything and then press C to enter into circle select mode which allows us to sort of paint selection and then I can just left-click and drag across those right-click to get out of that mode and now what we can do is press s X and 0 and then we have the although straightened in fact let's just show one more way to do that let's go ctrl Z to undo Everest W instead to just do an automatic align it does basically the same thing now we'll go alt page to unhide everything and you can see the rest of the UVs aren't completely ruined like they would have been before follow active quads this is a great one for twisted curved pipes and wires remember the torus in 2.78 didn't have any generated UVs while in 2.79 or at least this current daily build anyway we do here's how we would create them for ourselves and if you have followed the wormhole tutorial you'll already know how to go about this if we tap into edit mode and first go ctrl tab to switch to edge select mode alt right click this edge loop and let's say one of the ones just here shift alt right click this to add that loop to the current selection then let's go ctrl e to bring up our edges menu and then let's mark those as seams a and then a again to make sure we have everything press you to bring up the unwrap menu and let's select unwrap whether we choose angle based or conformal based we're not really getting what we want and this is where our follow active quads comes into it so first to use our follow active quads it's going to need an example face with some UVs on to take as input or in other words we're telling blender how we want all the other UVs to look like based on the face we have selected so to get something nice and even let's just reset them so I'm going to go U and then reset at the bottom there now every face has been made to fit the whole space of our UV map here now currently it looks like this one with a slightly different shading is the active face and that's fine let's go U and then follow active quads and then either of these options are fine I'm going to just select even and then select okay and then I'm just going to pack that with ctrl P I don't need any margin whatsoever so I'm going to set that down to zero and you can see that's just currently using a quarter of the space on the y-axis so let's go s to scale Y and then 4 to scale that up and then again ctrl P to just pack that in finning and unfold in say we've got the small area of a scene done like this top of a building there's this little corner that we have here and it's really simple stuff I've just got this single plane for example which just makes up this floor area if I go shift space to minimize the view I'm using UV editing window layout by the way we can see we've got options to see our UVs here so I'm going to tap into edit mode and there's the UVs for this ground plane now let's say we want to extrude this out a little bit let's go ctrl tab just make sure we're in edge select mode right select this edge press e to extrude it and then X to constrain it along the x axis left-click to drop it into position and you can see we get all these streaky lines because the face for these UVs is basically bunched up really tight as thin as this edge going along the bottom now I say we want to unwrap this but we want these to stay perfectly into position so what we want to do is just make sure this stuff doesn't move so I'm going to control tab and select the face here and then I'm going to come over to the uv/image editor and press P to pin those UVs now it doesn't really look like anything's happened so it might be best to they'll switch to vertex select mode so ctrl tab to do that and you can see the vertices here and now they've got these little red squares on each corner so now if we select everything just press a a couple of times to do that and then press e in the UV image editor to unwrap you can see that those stay in position and now we get the correct proportions for this new face that we've got or if we want to go controls there just to undo that we can actually do the same thing in this window and just press u and then unwrap that's just basically exactly the same thing now to unpin them we just need to now go alt p for a bit more of an explanation on pinning on wrapping you can check out this old tutorial on CG masters net multi object editing here I've got the two objects in the scene I have this monkey mesh and I've got the base for it to sit on they don't have any textures on here this is just using a map cat material for the moment what they do both have some movies so we tap into edit mode and select all the faces you can see that our UV layout looks like that and for the monkey mesh it looks like this now what if we wanted both of these objects to share the same texture and we didn't want the UVs to overlap what we can do is select the base object then ship select the monkey mesh tab into edit mode with the CI UVs to the monkey mesh but we can't see the UVs for our base object but if we were to come down to the View menu and draw other objects then you can see in the background there if we border select across these with the B key and smooth them out the way there's our UVs for the base object now quick tip here is if we come over to the user preferences find our themes tab come over to the UV image editor we've got our auto object UVs color swatch here and here we can basically change this to whatever we want and then we can just exit and carry on manipulating our UVs so now we can scale these down maybe with the s key G to move them into position and now they're in a unique position on our texture map one of the downsides this is we can't really interact with the UVs of our other objects if we wanted to snap and align to other UV positions that we can see on our base object here we can't really do that at the moment but we'll talk about that a little bit more very shortly so right now I'm in blended 2.78 and I want to point out a quick behavior change between 2.78 and the upcoming 2.79 and that's if we come down here and press the new button to create a new texture so let's just call this texture and then we'll make this a color grid and then just press ok and what we can see here there's our UVs or even though we still have drawer other objects on you can see there are no UVs showing for our base mesh now this is because it's only the other objects that share the same texture within our UV image window here that are going to show up together so if we were to tap out of edit mode and select the basis object on its own tab into edit mode and then come down and find that texture select it from the list tap back into object mode shift select the monkeyhead tap into edit mode again and now we can see faintly there's our outline for the UVs back again alright so I've jumped into an early version of 2.79 and I'll just want to show you the differences here so let's just step back a bit so let's select the base object tap into edit mode I'm just going to get rid of this texture by clicking on the little X icon there and then let's tap back into object mode shifts like monkey mesh and then tap into edit mode again and then you can see again we have despite the drawer of the objects option enabled only the UVs for the active object is showing up now what we have now is that we can press n to bring up our properties sidebar and you'll see a little section down here the draw or the objects option and we can now have this filter whether we want the only to show same image or whether we don't want it filtered at all we just want to show all UVs and when we select that all there you can see now the UVs I've shown up again so I think that's a really handy feature as previously that could cause quite a lot of confusion alright so I'm back in version two point seven eight and now let's think about if we actually did want to snap some movies of this object to this object or align them or something like this the best option that we have right now is an add-on by nd 85 you can download it from here and by the way Andreas has been working on some seriously cool stuff elsewhere for example the B painter add-on which definitely worth looking into and everything he touches basically - definitely worth supporting so if we open up into our user preferences come over to the add-ons and then let's just type in UV and then there's our multi object UV edit in I've already been through the steps to install this though it is very simple you just download the zip file unzip it find the dot py file and then just install from file here find that pipe file and then it'll show up in this list once this is enabled what we can do is press the T key to show our tool shelf and now let's ship select the monkey mesh and you see the UV Tools pops up now with this little option now just before I do that I'm just going to split this window over here left-click and drag from the top right and switch that over to proxies window and come over to the modifiers because both of these objects have modifiers on this has got a subsurf modifier this one has got a bevel and a subsurf modifier set to two iterations this one's set to three in the view so if I select this object and then shift select the monkey mesh and then go to multi-object UV edit in you can see that's going to shake change the shape of the base object quite a bit but now at least what we can do is get in there and manipulate our UVs so for example we want to select them press W maybe align Auto and now they're both aligned horizontally once we're finished with that we can just tap back into object mode and everything is returned back the way it was we have this bevel and subsurf modifier here and we have this one which has just got the subsurf modifier on so if that's what you need I think that's definitely worth checking out so many thanks to Andrea's to making that awesomeness available to everyone animated UVs if you've seen the wormhole tutorial you'll definitely already know all about this the best and most versatile way to control animated UVs is with the warp UVs modifier so let's give ourselves some geometry shift a mesh plane I'll hit f6 take a look at our construction info here and I'm going to select the generate UVs tab into edit mode there's AI UVs let's give this a texture so we can see what's going on click on the new button there and then let's change that to a color grid and then click OK let's zoom out a little bit and so that we can see that texture on our geometry let's just go for a simple textured solid option in our property tool shell so n2o this up and there we can find textured solid under the shading area and I'm going to close that again with the N key so I've got my red x-axis line that you can see going from left to right on the screen and our x-axis is going from left to right on the UV image editor as well so I'm going to align these so that they look basically the same so we want a 1 to a 8 happening at the bottom of this as well so I'm going to press a in the UV image editor to select all our UVs and then just go our 90 just to rotate that round all right so let's tap back into object mode come over to the modifiers click on the add modifier pull down list and we can find UV warp right there now all it needs is a from and a 2 so let's click on the plane as the from and now we're going to need a second object for our 2 but we don't have any other objects so let's create one let's go shift a and add in an empty for this plane axes will do reselect our plane and then select in the to field the empty if we had multiple UV maps we would want to specify that here but there's no harm in being extra precise here just selecting it anyway and now with everything else at default we can select our empty and then just simply select one of the axes here or just press G and then X and then we can see we're now moving it along the horizontal axis or G and why to push it forwards and backwards we can also scale with the S key and press R to rotate them around as well and it's really as simple as that and if you want a more practical example as stated earlier feel free to warp over to the wormhole tutorial where we'll be warping through that wormhole with the warp modifier and that's well more uses of the word walk than we really need let's warp on to the next chapter let's take a look at transferring UV maps from one object to another it's actually pretty common to model first and then on rap and texture so often you'll find yourself at a scene with scattered objects that are basically the same thing but we now want to try and copy you these from one object to the other you might have subtle differences so for example let's go shift a and get a mesh in the scene here I'm going to use the monkey mesh press T to open up the tool shelf and I've got the generated UVs option selected because I'm cheekily in an early build of 2.79 again to do that so I'm going to then press T to close that tool shelf and then tap into edit mode and there's our UVs and then as you can see we have that color grid already created so I'm going to place that in the background of our UVs there and now because we have our shading textured solid option on so when we're in solid shading mode we can see the texture in the back of our UVs there gives us this fairly even lighting to be able to easily unwrap it so now we have one monkey object there let's go shift D Z to move it up a little bit and now we have this one maybe these were some crazy bricks in a wall or gargoyles on a host or something and we very subtly changed the locations of its topology so for example just a little bit of an 8-week and now let's say we've painstakingly unwrapped this one and this one has very very basic UVs for example this so I've just pressed E in the UV image editor which is the same as going you and then unwrapped and it's given us that crazy unwrapping that we saw earlier and now what we basically want to do is copy the UVs from this object to this object and it's pretty simple all we need to do is shift select this one we want the active object to be the one with the good UV s we want to then go ctrl L to make links and we want transfer UV maps which is at the bottom and then once we select a target object again to have a couple of times just to refresh it you can see it's updated its UVs and it saved us a lot of time having to unwrap this a second time now let's say we tabbed into edit mode and we made a bit more of a significant change so for example ctrl R to create an edge loop here and then I'll just left-click to drop that into position with a slight edge slide and then in fact let's pull out of the socket a little bit further like this and now let's try our transfer UV map operation again so what I'll do is make sure that the one with the good UVs is the one selected last and they'll go ctrl L and then transfer UV maps and then oh we have this warning up here saying that basically if we pull that down because it goes pretty quick let's just pull that down and take a look at our info window the object that we're trying to copy you these two is basically different it has a different amount of loops so unfortunately for that it's not going to work this is where we bring out the big guns what we're going to do here is rely on a modifier so let's come over to the modifiers tab add modifier data transfer and then from the list let's do Suzanne and then also choose the face court let's pull this out a little bit more actually face corner detail where we can see UVs as an option and now here we have everything turned black and what I found in this case is what we need really is something where a lot of the shading has been made smooth so let's tap into edit mode select everything with a go ctrl F and then we want a shade smooth and then tap back into object mode and now it appears to be working a lot better now as you can see there are some UVs on this what they do look a little bit crazy and that's because it's based on will'd position so if we take a look at this icon over here it's basically saying the evaluate source and destination meshes in global space so if we press G is that to move this around you can see the closer it gets to our source mesh the kind of cleaner it looks but thankfully because we've got that button we can just uncheck it and use its local space instead and now you can see we have a little bit of red on the top we have a little bit of gold over here green we have these sorts of pink and purple eyes so for the most part this is looking pretty clean and the method that we're using here is based on nearest corner and matching face normal it looks like now let's just scroll through and see what we've got we've got projected face interpolated now at the top it's not looking so good I'm going to hold ctrl + middle mouse wheel down and then we get we can scroll through these pretty easily now this one is looking pretty good for the most part but we have an issue there scroll down again nearest corner of nearest face is still ignoring the issue there let's go down again and then these two pretty much similar but the matching normal isn't working very well for us so I'm going to just leave it at matching face normal instead now with that let's click apply and then tap into edit mode and we can see we've got some pretty decent UVs even with the different topology that we have so let's all right click this edge loop here the new one that we created and take a look at where it is and it's basically it's snapped to the nearest other UVs that it could find during the data transfer and so things have kind of squished up a little bit and that could look a little bit better so to fix that what I'm going to do is go ctrl + on the numpad just to expand our selection there let's go over to the mesh data tab and we'll click + for a new texe group now let's just call this UV fix and then we'll click assign now these select abilities have full strength in this group now let's come back over to the modifiers add another data transfer modifier find Suzanne and then it's the face corner data UVs when let's tap back into object mode press number one to take a look from the front orthographic view make sure that we're looking in local space and in fact let's just zoom in a little bit on that eye area and let's control middle mouse wheel through the options here until we have something which seems to work and right there as we went projected face interpolated it looked a lot better the problem is of course that it's destroyed everything else so this is why we have down here there's the option to put our UV fix in and now it's only going to apply those changes to those vertices that we had in that vertex group so with that I'm going to click apply and then tap back into object mode and now it seems that even those are nicely arranged for us let's jump into an early preview build up 2.79 again now and take a look at a cool new add-on that will be included called magic UV let's switch this UV image editor over to the user preferences and find our add-ons tab I'm going to filter all our categories to be just shows the UV related add-ons here's our magic UV add-on and once you open this up you'll see that we've got all these preferences and a link for more information definitely worth checking out and many thanks to naughty the main developer I believe and all of these guys for contributing to this awesome toolset and making it all available to the community this is really awesome stuff so a little further down we'll see this is where we'll find all the tools I'll switch this back to UV image editor all I really wanted to point out was that this add-on exists now but also I just want to point out a couple of features for example the bounding box scaling so let's press n to open up the properties sidebar let's press B and border select across this UV island and down at the bottom here we've got display UV bounding box when we do that you get all these little square points that make up this larger square and what we can do now is click on one of the little points so for example this one in the corner and that's going to allow us to left-click and drag in towards the opposite corner and we can get this little squash and stretch ability with our UVs we also have this point at the top which we can rotate around and when we do that we still have our UV bounding box for which to squish kind of may be constrained straight down or grab another corner and squish into the opposite corner again once we are done with it we can click on hide UV bounding box and then we can carry on as we were and just as an aside in a kind of similar vein we do actually have option to change our pivot down here as well so we can change to the 2d cursor for example which is this thing right here we can left-click to drop it into position and then press s and then we can scale towards that location and if we want to get really precise on that we can actually zero out values here so 860 by 640 for example to get it right on the grid but this UV bounding box scaling is also very cool and we can just leave that at its default let's do you select these with the a key and zoom in a little bit and just show off another feature so let's select that edge down here which is this area above the mouse and let's press u to bring up our UV mapping menu and here we have moved the UV from view 3d so when we left click this the edge that we have selected nothing really seems to happen at first but if we left click to confirm that we want to get moving the UVs on this edge when we now move our mouse around you can see while the cursor is actually in a 3d view it's definitely updating that position of the UVs in patooty window on the right hand side as well which means we can go shift space and just maximize the view here and let's maybe come up to this area for example and I say we just some reason want this edge here on UV grid to be aligned with this particular edge what we could do is go control tablet switch over to vertex select mode since this works in many of the modes and then select this vertex press you go to move the UV from view 3d and then left click to confirm and let's put one point there and do the same with this point so you move the UV from view left click to confirm and I'm going to place that one to be about there like this and then we're done so we never had to go into the UV image editor do or in that process so let's go ship space to minimize the view again and then let's take a look up and you can see of course there's UVs aligned with that edge if we wanted more precision though of course we could just go W and align Auto now that the roughly into position anyway or I guess if we really wanted things to be precise we could actually just key in numerical values anyways so let's scroll to the top here we have three eight four point four six there we changed that to three eight four point five instead you can see now smack bang in the middle there and that's just another little quick UV tip thrown in for free why not it's kind of an easy one anyway so again many thanks for the contributors of this add-on there's some very cool stuff in here and well worth the look and the final tip not using UVs at all let's dig into the cycles render engine and it's box mapping so here I am in cycles rendering I'm set to rendered view at the moment and you can see I've got this simple cylinder geometry in the scene it just has this diffuse shader on it down here on the bottom right we have UV image editor and that's just to show you what the grunge texture that I've brought into it looks like in 2d and now since we have the node Wrangler add-on enabled we can just select this diffuse shader and go ctrl T and that will set us up the image texture node the vector mapping node and the texture coordinates node now you can see it's set to UVs but this object doesn't have any UVs at the moment and besides it's all kind of pink anyway that's let us know that we don't have a texture in here at the moment so let's delete this with the X key and instead I'm going to left-click and drag from here and drag the grunge texture in there and now let's hook that up to the vector node and then let's plug that into the diffuse color channel now again you can't really see anything because this doesn't have any UV so it doesn't really know where to place anything so instead of using the UVs I'm going to use the object coordinates so let's plug that in and now we have something finally in our scene tall a bit on the stretchy side so it's at this point that some people might give up with this and just think our okay we're just going to have to unwrap this making sure that we have our seam there with its UV right at the top so it wraps around nicely with this tiling texture however we don't really need to do that what we could do is set it from flat to box and that gives us this blend slider and also the texture now looks a whole lot better going on down the main length of the cylinder what you can see clearly here's this seam that let's make it a bit more prominent by just left clicking and dragging across there scaling it up a bit so 0.2 and you see there's very clearly the seam going across there but with this blend as you probably guessed or perhaps you've know already we can just blend our troubles away and if you want a little bit more of a finer control of this while it not being so noisy in the view is a couple of things you can do one of the probably the most obvious ways to do this is just to switch the material view and now while the object isn't reflecting the environment around it which by the way is just this sky texture going into the background there if we just switch back to the object material nodes we can now play with this blend slider a little bit and you can see it does actually update in real time and I'm perfectly happy with it being about there and that's all we need to do we've essentially gotten away with not even needing to unwrap this object let's press n to bring up our property sidebar only show the render and have a little look round just a check that we're not cheating ourselves here by leaving any stone unturned or any theme still torn but this looks fine so after all that UV Tips & Tricks perhaps the way to go sometimes is to actually not even bother with you use whatsoever and that wraps us all up or perhaps I should say unwraps is all up if you think it's the punch so thanks for joining us in slaying any potential multi-dimensional UV demons in this Holness space VFX element series by Gleb Alexandra and me-80 burrows

Channel: CG Masters

Views: 301,696

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender, tutorial, beginners, uvs, uv, uv's, image editor, cgmasters, cg masters, cg, masters, data transfer, box mapping, spherical mapping, preserve uvs, no uvs, texturing

Id: brnaAL-QwhU

Length: 32min 27sec (1947 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2017