20 Tips to Speed Up UV Mapping in Blender

hi everyone my name is Zach and in this video we will take a look at training tips to speed up UV mapping in blender we will use blender 2.79 but I guess most of the things are also working in previous versions of blender also I guess there are many many other cool tricks for UV mapping and blender but I just want to show you tricks that I've used a lot and that I know which are pretty helpful for me and I think they will be helpful for you as well before we start two things I'm using the pie menus add-on this is this circular-shaped menu which appears when I'm switching between edit or object mode for example you can enable this in the user preferences you don't have to download anything else and I'm also using the letti light theme which you also can enable in the user preferences so please don't ask me about that yeah and if you want to get notified for future videos just enabled the bell under this video and if you find this video useful and want to support my channel check out my gum mode page link in the video description below alright without further words let's get started tip number one and generate UVs for UV unwrapping we need the UV image editor and the 3d viewport just to mention this and now let's hit T for the tool shelf and down here we have the operator panel this we will also need in this video and generate UVs basically means if you add a new object for example cube you can now check this generate UVs option down here and that will automatically generate the UV map for this specific object so let's check some other objects like the cylinder as you can see and even the monkey Suzanne has a UV map now how cool is that tip number two mark and clear seam and UV unwrap shortcuts here we can see a little monster dude which I have created doing my last character workshop from time to time I hold the workshops here in Germany and this is the result of the last workshop and here I would just want to quickly show you the main shortcuts we will use the one is for adding a seam let's select the edge selection and if you have select one or more edges press ctrl e and click on mark seam if you want to remove and seam you can select them press ctrl e again clear seam and then this seam is gone and if you want to unwrap the whole model press a to select everything you and then unwrap besides those shortcuts you find this also over here under shading UVs UVs tip number three smart UV project sometimes you have models various very bad topology in this case for example we have a scanned skirt and I already would use the poly count with a decimate modifier and if I would use this in games or animations and certainly I had to create a reat apology object with a nice topology and then UV mapping and so on is easy but in this case it's nearly impossible to create a UV map you can see we have a lot of triangles here but if we just want to use this and bake some ambient occlusion maps or quickly paint on the surface we can create a not so nice looking UV map but a UV map we can work with for this and now in edit mode press you for unwrapping and here I choose smart UV project now I can define an angle limit so basically we define the angle where the edges should be split and then we have this island margin which basically defines the space between the islands and the rest we leave as it is and then I hit OK and now you can see we have this UV map if this is not what you like you always can press you again smart UV project change the value here for angle limit and try it again for example if I make it quite low so and now you can see we have much more islands than before so the bigger the angle the less islands you have but there is more stretching and more hours I guess and the lower the angle the more islands you have but with less stretching and so on also this is pretty useful if you import some CAD models from buildings for example they always have an ugly topology and this smart UV project can save your butt if you just want to put some textures on the walls and so on tip number four project from view this is also pretty helpful for example if you want to add some logos or whatever to an object then we can select this select a few faces like this year and then we take a look from the front here and then we press you and project from fuel then basically what we will see here will be projected as UV map over here and after a few other tips I will show you how to put this to good use tip number five live unwrap this is one of the coolest tips let's switch over to edit mode go to options and here I enable live unwrap that means after I have unwrapped the model the first time I press you and unwrap and from now on if I add a seam let's cut off the arm here for example ctrl e mark seam then it will unwrap the model automatically that means you will save the step by pressing you unwrap all the times when you want to update your UV map tip number six tag seam we can save us even more steps let's switch to options again life on web is still enabled and under edge select mode we can select tech scene that means every time I press ctrl and right click on an edge it will be automatically detect a seam and if you control white click on this again the scene will be removed and there's a other cool trick for example if I right click on this and then hold down ctrl right click on this edge here it will connect the first selected edge with the shortest way to the next selected edge and automatically take this as seam and if you combine this with live unwrap you can unwrap your model pretty quickly tip number seven and keep UV and edit mode mesh selection in sync what I find pretty annoying in UV mapping is said you only can see the UV map if you select the certain areas over here at the mesh as you can see but it would be pretty cool if we have this live unwrap and take seam enabled to see what happens over here and we can do this by enabling this little button here keep UV and edit mode mesh selection and sync and now if I select something here it will automatically be selected over here and the other way around so and if you have tech seam and live and web enabled then this is even cooler so for example let's select this year mark seam and then you can see automatically what happens over here so you can see how quick you can add your seams and automatically see what happens over here in the UV image editor with your UV map then control white click on this year for example to remove this or simply select this tool here press ctrl e maxime and in this way you can pretty quick unwrap your whole model tip number eight mower seems what I can't really find in blender is a way to simply mirror the seams from one side to the other maybe there's an add-on for this I don't know but I find a quick workaround to do this so on this model you can see I have seams only on one side of the mesh and now I want to copy all the seams to the other side now simply select one edge which is marked a seam press shift G for the select similar menu and choose seams now as you can see all seams on the model are selected now down here under select we choose more now it tries to mirror the selection as you can see 8 edges are failed that means if the model is not 100% symmetrically it may happen that it can't mirror everything perfectly but as you can see this looks quite good and now we simply can mark this seam and in this way we have mirrored the selection certainly this only works if you have a symmetrical object now let's hit you unwrap yeah and as you can see this looks quite good tip number 9 set up the island margin the island margin is basically the space between the different islands so if I unwrap this by pressing you unwrap we have this Martian value down here and the operator panel in the tool shelf and if I increase this you can see the space between the islands will be bigger tip number 10 change unwrapped method so if we add so then and don't enable this generate uese let's switch over to edit mode enable a life and rag tech seam let's unwrap this once also I keep UV and 3d viewport in sync and now if I add the seams you can see at some point something strange is happening although this object is 100% symmetrically as far as I can tell you can see this UV map is somehow distorted this side is smaller than the other although everything should be perfectly symmetrical and if this is happening let's select everything and press you unwrap again and then down here in the operator panel and a method we change the method to conformal and as you can see now this looks perfectly fine tip number 11 island selection if you have unwrapped your model and now want to place all this islands on your UV map it's pretty handy to select complete islands and there are two ways to do it the one way is simply moving your mouse cursor over one island and press L and if you want to select multiple islands press shift L now you can edit them or you simply enable down here the islands election with white clique now you can select the whole islands or with shift right-click you can select multiple islands but take care this does not work if you have this sync option down here enabled if I now press L you can see I get an error and I don't have this island selection method here anymore keep that in mind if this option does not show up tip number 12 protect Islands let's assume you have unwrapped your model and placed all the islands on your UV map and now you want to change small things like you have added some geometry to your object and need to unwrap this or you want to change the UV map of a certain area like the hand and then if I press you unwrap again then blender will calculate the islands again and place them somewhere and you can see all your work is destroyed but you can protect your islands so simply select all the islands you want to protect and then press P for pinning them now you can see all the vertices are marked wet and if I now select everything here press you unwrap again you can see only the hands will be unwrapped again and if you want to remove the pins simply select all the vertices which are pinned press alt P tip number 13 UV scalloped did you know that you have a sculpt mode in the UV image editor so press T under options you have UV sculpt you can enable this and now you can move the vertices around and if you go to tools you also have some options like the radius of strings lock borders which is enabled right now you can see I can't move the ball as a wound but if I disable this I can move them around so this is perfect if you have some stretch in your UV map and want to correct the stretch you also have some other cool brushes like the relaxed brush it's like the smooth brush in sculpt mode or the pinch brush as you can see it behaves like this so if you want to make some many adjustments to your UV map this is pretty helpful tip number 14 shows stretching so one of the goals for creating a good UV map is that the proportions and scaling of one phase on the UV map should look basically the same as on the 3d model and also in relationship to the other phases on the UV map it should have the same proportions so for example if I make this really big and the rest really small then the texture has much better quality in this area then on this area here so there's a cool way to show you how much your model is stretched so I press N and over here we can enable this stretch and then we have two options angle this basically shows how much one phase is stretched in relationship to the original face on the 3d model you can see if it's dark blue then this is pretty good and the more green yellow orange and wet this will be the weather it gets as you can see so if everything is nearly blue as you can see here this is pretty good and then we have this area stretch this basically compares the size of all the phases here so if one phase in relationship to all the other phases is much bigger here then it is on the 3d model you can see it will be colored in wet and wet is always bad blue is very nice so you can see for example this area here is much smaller on the UV map than it is on the 3d model for example and another good thing to see it if you for example scale one island much bigger than the other islands you can see how this will be colored in green yellow orange and red so in general the goal is to keep all the islands in the same size except you want to have a higher resolution on a certain area like the face for example then you should scale this island bigger then you have now a higher resolution on this area and a lower resolution on the rest and certainly you should take care that none of the islands overlapping tip number 15 average island scale now let's get back to this example here I've scaled the face much bigger than the rest and now I want to scale it down again so that it has the real size and it's pretty hard to estimate this so I select everything press T and here under tools UV tools I click on average island scale and now you can see everything has the right size in relationship to each other tip number is 16 live on web UV image editor so this might be a little bit confusing because we have two options with the same name doing two different things so we already know the option live unwrap we can enable over here in the tool shelf of the 3d viewport but if I press T over in the UV image editor under options we also have a live unwrap option but as you can see if I enable this this will not automatically be enabled so these are two different things and this live unwrap is also pretty cool and now let's select everything and disable their syncing here and now I select some of the corner points of one Island and press P for pinning and now with this live on web enabled I can select the pins and by hitting G I can move them around and as you can see this island is now pinned on these edges and if I move these pin points you can see how this is sticking together certainly you can add and remove as many pins as you like with all P you can clear the pins and in this way it's pretty easy to adjust islands quickly if you have some stretching in there tip number 17 UV grid texture so if you are done with your UV map and you can't really understand the stretching and just wanna see if your UV map works you can add a new texture down here and then you call this whatever you like change the resolution if you like and then down here under generate type we can add this UV quit and now you can see it creates this checkered texture and now we want to view it on the model and for this simply add a new material on the surface behind color I press on the start choose image texture and here we take a look in the image library and which uses UV grid texture we just added here then let's switch over to material viewport shading and now we can see this texture on the model and if all the squares are nearly the same size and if you don't have actually stretching in some areas then you did a good job for example here you can see some weird behavior in this texture so I had to change something here but in general this looks quite ok I would say tape number 18 multiple UV maps did you know that you can create more than one UV map for your object and this can be quite handy so we have one main UV map here and now I want to add my logo on his belly and for this I create a second UV map let's switch over to object data UV maps and here you can see this is a standard UV map and now let's hit the plus button let's call this logo and now let's create another UV map you can see it copied automatically the UV map from the first UV map but I only need a UV map for the belly so let's select everything scale this down to zero that means I can move this one dot around and now I select the belly with a face selection and now this project from view method will be used again which I showed you in an earlier tip so I press you project from view now I can scale this if I like and as you can see now I have this exact projection over here and there I will protect my logo on so let's add the node editor over here ayuh quickly switched over to mature of you pod shading and here I have a very simple Ceyda and now I want to add my logo so I drag and drop it from an external folder into the node editor then it will automatically create this image texture also I quickly add the texture of this dinosaur thing and connected with the diffuse shader and now you can see since I have two UV maps I have to select the UV map over here which will show up in the viewport and now we have to define which UV map which texture should use so let's hit shift a input UV map for the top one we simply use our standard UV map connect this with vector then I duplicate this and choose a local one connect this and now we need to mix those two textures so let's go to color mix RGB black both in there and as mix vector I choose alpha value for my logo and as you can see now my logo is only viewed on the second UV map and certainly we can edit this so let's go to logo make this bigger for example also we can scale this if my logo is not displayed correctly and now you can see the repetition and if you don't want this you can set the texture extension to clip that means it will be cut off on the sides you can't see this in the viewport sadly but if you hit render you can only see this logo once and if you want to delete a UV map simply select this in this list here and hit the minus button tip number in nineteen to all other objects sometimes you want to recreate one texture for multiple objects and there's a very simple way to show UV maps of two objects for example I select this box here and then with shift the I then let's switch to edit mode and here we can see the UV map but we can't see the UV map of the Fox so I press N and here and the display I enable to all other objects and if you can't see the other UV map you maybe have to switch to all under filter and I also had trouble if all the objects already have materials so if this doesn't show up you have to remove the materials so and now I can select this and place it somewhere here and now I can use one texture for both objects and before you go down to the comments and right there's an add-on for this wait to the next step tip number 20 texture Atlas add-on so same case as before we want to use one texture for multiple objects but in this case we also want to edit both UV maps at the same time and this is possible using the texture atlas add-on I press ctrl alt you to open up the user preferences go to add-ons and here I search for ticks and they were the texture atlas and we will find it under properties render save user settings if you want to keep this texture Atlas add-on enabled and now down here under renderer we find this texture Atlas now let's select all objects press + ok now you can change the resolution and so on but I simply want to go to start manual unwrap now as you can see with all the selected objects I can now switch to edit mode and edit all the UV maps at the same time as you can see I now can change the eyes if I like and when I'm done I press finish manual unwrap and now if I take a look into the eyes you can see this UV map is now updated yeah pretty easy huh ok I've lied at the beginning this video not only contains 20 tips it contains training 1 shapes so here's a bonus tip for you tip number 21 selecting islands in the 3d view this tip is not really related to creating UV maps but after you've created UV maps and placed all the seams on your object you can do one cool thing if I switch to edit mode and have for example vertex or edge selection this does not work if I now press L you can see simply the hole connected mesh will be selected same thing for edge selection but if we enable face selection and I hit L you can see it only selects the mesh which is an extra effect one eyelet so if I add the uv/image editor you can see now only this body island is selected and if I hit L over the head you can see only the head Island is selected you can hit L multiple times to add more islands to the selections so simply move your mouse cursor over the faces press L this is everything and I find this really helpful if you are in for example texture paint or weight paint mode and just want to restrict the area on which you can paint so let's switch to texture paint mode for example here we can see the texture of this dinosaur and if I enable this button down here I'm able to select faces with right click or shift right click for multiple and the same thing here if I press L over the head for example only the head island will be selected and now I can draw on this object and I don't can paint on the not selected areas and the same thing for weight paint mode if you are for example skinning your object while awaiting you can restrict the areas so you just select the islands on which you want to paint and then you can paint only on this islands as you can see pretty helpful white and yeah that's the last tip but before you see my face again just a short question for what topic you would like to see another of these tip videos here I had in mind for example rigging and skinning with topology texture painting shading so tell me in the comments what you would like to see next ah and before I forget you can download this little creature wikked shaded and textured down below in the video description for free yeah and you can use it for whatever you want but keep in mind this was created in a workshop so it's not perfect the week is not perfect the shaders and textures are not perfect but who cares have fun with the model yeah guys that's it with this video I hope you liked it and learn a few things if so tell your friends about it and more important share this video share it across the whole internet if you like by the way do you also have struggled to learn something new or want to prove your 3d skills or digital 2d painting skills if so then our weekly CT challenge could be something for you you can join us challenge completely for free without which is trading anywhere on Facebook if you like you can join the group and meet a lot of other cool artists and you can win some great prizes if you want to learn more about this check out Wheatly cg challenge comm yeah as mentioned at the beginning if you want to support my channel so that i can produce more videos like this in the future then check out my cam mode page the link is in the video description below also if you want to get notified in the future about the stuff I'm doing check out my newsletter the link is also in the video description thanks a lot for watching and we see us in the next video goodbye [Music] okay you know there would be something at the end of this video alright this time I just want to talk about improving yourself in the last videos I got a lot of comments which are making jokes how I pronounce certain words in English and personally I know my English is not perfect but anyway also if the people are making jokes I just thought it's a good inspiration for me to improve myself so I just google for some stuff and I found this pretty cool YouTube channel called English lessons for you learn English with Ronnie and the teacher is pretty funny and yeah there I learned quite some cool tips on how to pronounce different words like not real-time render engine it's called real-time render engine or it's not called Vikings it's called Vikings anyway I find this pretty useful and I thought I want to share this with you to take something like this as inspiration if people are criticize you just ask yourself should I improve or should I not improve it's worth the effort and I think improving the language is always a good thing and another cool tip a few years ago I wanted to improve my English and I used a cool smartphone app called - lingo which you can download for free and instead of scrolling through Facebook or watching YouTube videos or - whatever you do you just need 5 to 10 minutes a day and learn English so basically when I was on toilet high I was learning English with my smartphone yeah this are just two tips for you this video was not sponsored by any of the things I mentioned here the links to this are in the video description if you like to check them out and yeah that's it with this video and now it's been does something in real time

Channel: CG Boost

Views: 116,361

Keywords: blender, 3d, 2.7, animation, rendering, 2.79, uv mapping, uv unwrap, fast uv mapping, quick uv map, uv map, uv image editor, live unwrap, uv sculpt, mirror seams, multiple uv maps, texturing, shading, how to create uv maps in blender, quick uv mapping

Id: bWPD2aEd8tY

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 02 2017