3D Modeling Tutorial #36 - UVW Mapping Part 1

hello and welcome to part 36 of my 3d modeling series in this video I'd like to teach you guys about unwrapping your model so up till now I've been talking a lot about modeling and different techniques and there's still a long way to go on in that regard but I'd like to also teach you simultaneously about how we can begin to texture our models and apply different materials but before I can do that I first need to teach you the basics of one of unwrapping so the best way to think of this as inverse paper crafts whereas in paper crafts you have a 2d two-dimensional piece of paper and you cut out cut out and you fold it until you get something three-dimensional a character or an item an object something like that with unwrapping you're doing the opposite you already have your 3d object now I try to make it flat so there are two modifiers that relate to this we have UVW map and unwrap UVW and the way you should think about this is that an a UVW map is like a quick and dirty version of unwrap UVW it has it has kind of cycle a makeshift version of unwrap UVW most of the time you should use unwrap UVW but if you want quickly text an object that's not very important and won't be close to the camera then you can probably get away with just using UVW map so you can see I've got unwrap UVW in my shortcut box here and in some of I'm ready to when I have an object I can just click here so let's go over what kind of parameters we have here first of all this this modifier has three sub object modes vertex edge and face keep in mind that this is not the same as edit poly you can't actually move or do any do any operations like cut or extrude this is purely once you're ready with your object then you start the unwrapping process if you plan on doing any more edits to your object I recommend not and wrap nut unwrapping it only unwrap once you've completely finished with your object and you're happy and you've got all the quads that you would like in all the control edges so we have some simple parameters here in the selection parameters we have plus and minus they can be used to grow and subtract what we have currently selected if you get to a certain point you will be you won't be able to for example I can press + and it will grow if I press + again it will grow but now if I press - it's not going to shrink because now it has no frame of reference and that's that's similar with the - if I grow if I click - and - and now I click on plus it has no frame of reference so it doesn't really know from what it's trying to grow so keep that in mind but this is used to grow and shrink your selection next we have ring and loop which is only possible with the edge mode as you can see when I switch to face or vertex the ring and loop become dark which means you can't use them but that's self-explanatory I've already told you guys how you can use ring and loop with edges and edit poly and it's the same concept here ignore back-facing is also similar if I try to control everything I mean select everything you can see it does not select the back faces however if I uncheck ignore back-facing that will select everything so keep in mind this is on by default select by element allows me to select my element just like I would with edit poly in this case it's not much good because it's just one element here planar angle allows me to select just like the face and then select adjacent faces depending on what angle they are from the original this is set to 15 degrees so the difference so you can see as this object goes up here and then there's an angle and it goes this way this direction this is greater than 15 so you will not select that but if I for example move this out you can see that the angle is now less this is a sharp angle this is 90 degrees but here it's not so it's not so sharp anymore so now if I apply unwrap UVW check this maybe increase it to something like 35 you can see now it selects about this face and that face because the difference between this angle it's no longer 90 it's now less than 35 this angle right here which means that it has selected that so it automatically selects that this can be very useful in some situations where you want to select a bunch of faces but you don't want to manually you know select and click every single one that's a good method we have selected material ID I will cover material IDs later but keep in mind if you have your object you cannot you cannot set material IDs with this modifier this is only for selecting currently current material IDs and now car what material IDs are in the later video and then we have select by smoothing groups so I've already told you guys so you can use smoothing groups if your model has smoothing groups you can use this to select various smoothing groups and you can use smoothing groups to help you unwrap as well so before before you put on any unwrapped modifiers you can go ahead and you know set your smoothing groups you see the smoother groups are already set here but this is a very simple object so the usefulness of this will really become apparent when you have a more complex object which how will it which I will show you guys soon next we have the parameters here this is where you actually go to be to see what the object looks like in a 2d fashion so you click click on edit and this window will open up and this is where you can see what the object will look like in 2d so right now by default do you have a checker pattern as the background you can click on pick texture that will open up a window and you can browse in any folder on your computer and pick a texture as the background here so you can actually have like a background texture here you can also click on remove texture to remove the checker and just have this which is what I prefer most of the time so here we also have reset you VW's if you click on that it will ask you are you sure and you can click on yes that will basically reset everything you've done all the attitude minted uvw what you're technically doing here the official terminology is that you're setting up mapping coordinates and when you're here you're editing the uvw coordinates that's the official terminology we can also save and load different configurations so if you're happy with what you've got here you can click on save save that it saves it as a dot UVW I believe and you can always click on load and restore that configuration next we have map channels remember that you can have multiple channels which basically means that you can have multiple UVW configurations coordinates from one object this is useful in many situations later on I might have a video about how we can use this to create a nice invisibility effect if you if you've ever seen like a cutscene or a game trailer or a movie trailer where there is a special effect where the character goes invisible from like head-to-toe the invisibility effect gradually goes from the bottom to the top that's achieved with map channels so the actual textures of your character like the scratches and the skin and all that that's on the one channel but you use a different channel with a different with different coordinates to set up that 3d effect that invisibility effect and I'll show you guys how we can use that then we have vertex color channel you can assign colors to various vertices and this can help you in achieving various effects with your geometry your materials particles that's where vertex colors come in but for now it's not a concern for us then there are this a small box for display I usually click on thin scene display and so notice how when I change these the actual seams these green edges will change I like to use thin seam display and I also like to uncheck show map seam you'll notice that and not in lots of situations I'd like to turn off these little doodads because they kind of over complicate things that's one of the reasons their press J to turn our selection brackets because they really they don't help me and just kind of crowd the scene and they kind of interfere with the process you can see I've got edged faces on and if I have selection brackets on the selection brackets actually interfere with my reading of the model like I want to see exactly where the edges are and these low selection brackets are kind of interfering with that so in lots of situations wherever I am whatever whatever program I'm using I always like to turn off these little things and and various settings that kind of make it more difficult to read to analyze your model so that's what I like to just turn off show map scene and prevent reef latnok this has to do when you're baking textures rendering to texturing its basically prevents it from flattening but I'll I'll tell you guys about that later and next we have map parameters this is what you'll actually be cutting into your mesh and doing your unwrapping you have a variety of different ways you can unwrap your model XYZ and average normals are your basic and then you basically just make a selection click on XYZ or average normals and then click on click quick planar map that will give you a planar map then you also have a Pelt cylindrical spherical box and spline and then you also have these options here and it seems point-to-point seam edge lecture to seams and expand face selection to seams right so with this box we don't have to actually use any of these this is a very simple object and to unwrap this may go ahead and delete that or I could have just I could have just clicked on reset you VW's so - you can also switch between vertex edge and face right here vertex edge and face select element + - loop ring you can also click on + + - next to loop and ring to increase how much you loop and ring okay so this is what the box's current coordinates look like every face is basically right here oh that you can you can move this around you can hold shift to snap it to a particular direction so if I hold shift and move up it's only gonna move up right now and if I hold shift and move left that's only gonna move left and right so right now the the default unwrapping of a box is just all those six faces just put right here in the middle and so basically if we apply a texture right now let me go ahead and click on reset UW's all right let me go ahead and apply texture this is the texture I have this is just a basic kind of scratched metal texture I'm gonna click on so this is this is my material I'm gonna click on right here assign material to selection and then I'm gonna go in here and make sure this button is turned on show standard map in viewport this will show your texture in the viewport if I turn this off it will not be visible so I'm going to click it and so now you can see this is the default uvw configuration these are the four default mapping coordinates for a cube and you can see because all the faces are in the same position taking up the same space what happens is that every face of this cube has the exact same texture you can see the repetition here you can see the same thing is happening on every face and this might be what you want however in most situations this is not what you want you want a unique a unique texture a unique unique pixels for every single part of your object so in making especially in the case this is not a stylized object if you have like a stylized object like something that's not realistic you can probably have the same texture because the texture won't be very detailed however in this case if we were to make like a realistic box like a crate full of supplies it's not going to be the same on every single face so this default mapping coordinates are not very helpful what we're gonna want to do is we're gonna go ahead and press control a select all the faces when Google mapping we have three options here flatten mapping normal mapping and unfold mapping if we click on flatten mapping that will give us a few settings here like the face angle threshold and the spacing usually the default settings work just fine and what this will do is this will come at your model from all angles and just kind of try to flatten it out hence the name so I'll click on OK with the default settings you see it takes all those faces and gives it its own space so now we've got six faces here and now you can see that wherever I turn there's a unique texture it's not looking good right now because you have to do a little bit more work to get something good looking but it's got a nice unique texture however the problem now is seams so you notice that seams is that when the various faces don't connect and you get these seams which look quite ugly you want to eliminate seams as much as possible and I'll get into how we can eliminate seams later we're still just laying with the basics right now so you can see here we have a particularly nasty looking seam here so the reason for that is quite simple if I click on change to edge and click here these are the two edges right here this is one edge and this is another edge and they're far apart right now so the texture that we have you know one is like right here and other one is right there of course they don't connect at all so we get these seams another way we can unwrap our model to help eliminate to help reduce seams not completely eliminate is to control a and use unfold mapping we have several settings here waktu furthest face and farthest face and walk to closest face if we click on okay you can now see that it has unwrapped unfolded or cube in a more logical way what you would expect to see with a real live paper box like this and now you can see the seams have been eliminated in in these places but there's still a seam between you know these edges these edges and so on but has reduced the seams in this place so right now you can see that shading is present on this cube if I click on here the flat mode which I told you about in one of my very early videos this is where the flat mode really comes into its own this is where I use it for click on flat and it's gonna go ahead and eliminate all the shading and highlights and just show me the flat texture and you can now see that because of this different these different coordinates there is no seam here now you see the texture follows and just continues and there is no seam here as well but there is a seam here and there are CMAs here sometimes we can get away with having seems especially with if you're using different types of geometry if you're creating a wall for example you can hide the seams using you know wooden pieces or concrete pieces just like a building is logically put together so you can hide seams but I'll show you in the future a way to eliminate seams but that will involve manually painting the actual textures yourself that's the best way to eliminate seams and to get the best looking custom textures so that's the basics of unwrapping UVW now I need to show you how you can use these additional features all right so here's a I think I showed you guys this motto previously if you look in the description for this video you will find the artist the the concept artist that drew the art where I got the inspiration for this rifle from and you'll also find a link to where you can actually download this model for yourself this model once again is not perfect it's something I made very quickly for beginners to have a look at and see various techniques for doing a pyjama tree but I'm gonna be using this model to show you more advanced unwrapping techniques so looking in script if you want this model if you're new or if you want to follow along go ahead and look in the description for a link to download this model as well as give credit to the original artist who drew the image that this is based on so tune in next time where I will show you guys how to unwrap different parts of this rifle thank you for watching and take care

Channel: Arrimus 3D

Views: 24,017

Keywords: UV Mapping, 3D Modeling (Profession), Tutorial (Industry), Autodesk 3ds Max (Software), 3d, 3ds, cg, cgi, arrimus, tutorial, unwrap, uv, uvw, texture, material, vertex, edge, polygon, face, UVW Mapping, Computer Animation (Industry), geometry

Id: k-zev89Is6g

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 14 2014