3DS Max - Projection Unwrap Tutorial

alright guys I recorded this video before sorry that there was no audio but I'm gonna try my best to redo exactly what I did and hopefully do it a little bit better so this is gonna be a UV unwrapping tutorial so I'm just gonna start really quick and we're just gonna make a box now hopefully you guys all remember how to make a box left-click and drag to make the length and width and let go left click and move it upwards to make the height now I'm just gonna make a box it could be any parameters I want but I'm gonna make some more segments here to increase the wireframe now turn on edge faces and now you can see this box has more polygons that I can play with so I'm gonna go to edit poly mode I'm just gonna modify my box so this is gonna be like a new object sort of thing and I want to make it a little more complicated that's in just a box I'm gonna do some simple extrusions here like that and I'm gonna make a couple more extrusions here this and there we go and I'm gonna delete the underneath here because there's that I don't need the floor no-one's gonna go in this building it's gonna be the outside of a building and I'm just gonna modify the vertexes a little bit to create a little roof okay so when you're working on an object now this isn't that complicated of an object it's a really simple object what you want to do to get a nice unwrap is to add a new modifier to your stack now we're gonna add the unwrap modifier so unwrap UVW modifier so what the unwrap modifier does is it basically takes your 3d object here which I'll maximize the viewport here for you guys the 3d object here and it tries to lay it out completely flat in 2d so that we can draw on it in Photoshop so what you need to do is under unwrap UVW you see all your new parameters that are opening up and one of the things we'll notice is at the top here we have vertex edge and polygon just like edit poly mode you're able to play around with vertex edges polygons but the one thing you might notice is that if you push wer we can't move we can't rotate we can't scale that's because you're not modifying the 3d object we need to modify the 2d unwrap of a 3d object so how we do that in 3d studio max is you add the unwrap UVW modifier and you go to edit UVs and you go to open UV editor now this opens a new window and this is called the Edit UV W windows and as you can see what's inside this checkered box if you click around especially does not match what's in our 3d scene if I keep clicking here you can see that the polygons don't really match up to what I have in this box that's because 3d studio max does an automatic unwrap of your object as best as possible to the original shape which was our box and when we started modifying it it just didn't know what we were doing it doesn't keep track of any of that that's why we have to modify our unwrap UVW z' so what you can do is you can grab the all the polygons but wait it looks like I grabbed all the polygons but if I rotate around the object I actually didn't that's because we're ignoring anything that's not visible to the camera with the selection tool when we're in unwrap UVW because of a special special selection tool called ignore back-facing if we just turn that off we can now select all the polygons of our 3d model and you notice that when i select polygons from the 3d model here it selects them here in our edit uvw window as well and if i deselect here we'll just you select a whole bunch you'll notice that things are being deselected in this window but if I hold ctrl and in this window I can add and deselect just in this window alone both of these work in tandem together so don't be afraid of not like not looking in one window and looking in the other it's ok to work in both these windows in fact if you have a dual screen I would recommend you switch this to a different screen so what we need to do is begin begin the unwrap process so in order to unwrap an object you kind of have to I know this will be very different for each model but in my model icon I'm looking at the sides and I go okay I have like about 4 sides I have the top I have the bottom I have a door and then I want to select the polygons and I want to do what's called projection unwrapping this is my way of unwrapping there are many tutorials on different ways to unwrap including scene seam use but for me I like projection unwrapping so that's what I'm gonna go for right now so I look down my modifier list and I see projection mapping so I go okay so first off I want to select the front of my house I'm gonna select the front of my house just like that I'll select here and that so now I got the entire front of my house selected now in my side my texture map when you look at it especially it's not looking like our house now one of the easiest ways to tell how a texture is going to come out is what's called the checkerboard and you can see a checkerboard pattern here but what we want to do is see the checkerboard pattern on top of our 3d model so if it looks like a checkerboard on top of our 3d model that means it's going to look good and unstretched if the 3d if the checkerboard looks stretched out and wrong in all these weird ways then that means it's probably not going to come out very good so in the top right corner we have a checker pattern option that's normally highlighted and that's just to enable the background checkerboard pattern but if I click it again it enables a checker pattern on my 3d object now you can see that some of it came out good and some of it came out really wrong so what we want to do is start tearing it apart into pieces so that we're able to color on top of it so I'm going to use my planar map here um projection map and then what you're telling it your 3d object with a projection map is essentially making a virtual camera and this is how it's going to look at the selected polygons to lay it out in your texture map now if I click play on our map it's gonna try and look at it flatly if I click on a cylindrical it's going to try and wrap around the entire object all on the sides and if I click on circle it's gonna try and rotate a camera all around the different parts of my object etc etc with box once I click on one mode you'll notice that that an orange box appears now that's how the camera is looking at your a 3d object now we also have a line options we're still in projection mode it's blue which means it's enabled now we have to play around the alignment to make sure it's aligned correctly you'll even notice the checkerboard pattern looks all wrong now so we have to make it aligned so X is not the proper alignment Y is the proper alignment and you'll see what happens if we do Z everything's kind of messed up looking so I'll go to Y and that looks good it still looks a little bit stretched out though so I'm gonna turn off projection mode right now and in my edit you VW's we have move rotate and scale so I'm gonna move my selected u-visa way okay right here out of the workspace anything that's in this checkerboard area is the workspace like the final workspace anything outside here is like your temporary zone where you do like some of your pre work your like previous work so I'm gonna drag everything out of that box now all my polygons are out of that box I'm gonna start modifying this part because what I noticed when I separate it and made the projection you know plane are flat here it's not really a checkerboard pattern it's more like a whole bunch of rectangles so we have move rotate and scale now pushing the r key over and over again isn't gonna change the type of scaling it is we actually have to left-click and hold on this scale tool and we can see a horizontal and vertical icon don't be afraid if it looks a little different than mine so I'm gonna scale it horizontally and you'll see now I'm forming the proper checkerboard pattern the more it's precise on a checkerboard the less stretched out your UV map will be and when we apply texture it won't be like all stretched and scaled really wrong so that's essentially what we have to do for every part of our model every time we want a separate part of the texture map done we have to select the polygons you know let me just yeah I think that would be okay why don't I select this entire side you select your polygons you choose the best projection type so if you have a more object that looks cylindrical or you want to wrap around let's say a leg or an arm or even a sword you can use the cylindrical map piece-by-piece on your selected polygons so select the appropriate poly and let's say for this one I want another plane our map I choose the right alignment X Y Z okay it looks like X is my best bet and then I turn off the projection app and I drag it where I want so use the Move tool and I drag it off the workspace and then I do my stretching and scaling to make sure everything kind of looks like a checkerboard pattern now you'll notice the side of my wall here looks pretty good that's a nice checkerboard but on top here I got some stretching issues now this isn't something I could just fix with the stretch and scale - all on its own I'm actually just gonna go to my unwrap UVW go to vertex and I'm gonna grab fur Texas with the move tool and adjust them manually and you see I can adjust the texture map myself to look good and let's see I notice this and this might need a little bit more room here and if I move my polygons here I get a little there you go so now I have the side of my house which I'm gonna scale and adjust to kind of match the front of my house a little bit so now I have the front inside of my house done I continue doing my work and I go to the other side and I'm pretty much gonna do the identical texture map here I'm gonna use my plane are gonna stretch the scale like a nice checkerboard then I'm gonna adjust the top with just my vertex tools remember you want everything to look like a checkerboard pattern the closer it is to a checkerboard pattern the better everything is gonna look and you can use polygon mode you can use vertex mode you can use edges whatever works best for you this is all literally there are like so many different ways to unwrap an object and there's a lot of different tools to use so don't be afraid to just like start doing one doing and going around your object selecting polygons using different projection maps and just making sure that you get a decent checkerboard result like a checkerboard right there so really it didn't take me too long and I got the front back and sides of my house here all done the last thing I have is my door so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab my entire door including the side frames here and I'm gonna use a another plane are here lay it flat there and I'm gonna scale it a bit so what I notice when I did this is I had the frame here still attached to the front door now you could see how little the space of the frame is taking here so even if I were to stretch in the inside of the door to give the frame some room it's still kind of a little bit awkward to play around with so I want to detach the frame of the door away from the actual you know door here I want to attach the doorway so I'm gonna detach the doorway I'm gonna grab all the polygons of the doorway and I'm gonna click tools and break I'm gonna use the move tool I'm gonna so I broke the door frame off the door do that right there so the break tool is good if you have different parts of your mesh and you want to like sort of texture them differently and you want to separate them out this is the best way to do it it creates seam lines which are the green lines we're seeing and now we know that this is a doorway and this is the actual door I'm just gonna scale it in mm like this there you go so now I have my door but my door is separate from my door frame and I saved room by scaling it just a little bit and putting it inside here leaving a little bit of room for my texture so when I draw it out there's a little bit of room and then so when I when I put it in my final box for the rendering it'll all fit nicely so I think I have pretty much everything I need done but I'm seeing a couple issues I have for instance the front of my house I grabbed a polygon by accident so if I click this polygon we're gonna notice oh no I grabbed it and it's kind of floating around or if it's attached to something else we can use the tools and we can use break to detach it but it's just a floating polygon right now so I need to weld it to these other vertices here so that it goes back to where it should be because right now we can't have two seam lines like this even putting it close like this just your your guess work is not gonna be good enough because we're gonna get that weird seam line and if we start drawing it's gonna look a little bit awkward so what we want to do is go to vertex mode and we go to tools and we go to target weld now what target well does is allows you to select one vertex and if you left-click on old a-w appears and it's looking for something to weld with what you're gonna notice I know it might be pretty hard to see is that when I select this vertex here this vertex goes blue other vertex is don't go blue but this one does that's because it's its partner vertex in the 3d mesh the blue vertex here is actually the same exact vertex here so in our 3d mesh they're welded but here they're not welded so we need to weld them and that's exactly what I'm gonna do you're gonna notice as I weld all the corners of this the green lines start disappearing and turning white they're no longer a seam they're not broken they're together and the seam is now fixed all around our 3d model the same thing happened over here the side of this wall I can just turn off this there we go the side of this wall detached by accident so I'll do the same thing I'll grow to vertex mode I'll go to chart tools target weld and then I weld these because just by left clicking and holding and dragging it over the other vertex I welded those together there you go so that was we broke some models apart into different pieces we broke the door frame from the door we target welded so what I want to show you next is how to render out a UV map so I'm gonna scale all these and fit them in my checkerboard box here because I want my final result I'm just going to grab these excuse me hold ctrl to grab more polygons hold alt to grab less polygons and I'm going to fit them all in this box now if the checkerboard pattern is really blocking your view and you kind of don't know where to adjust things in the top right there should be a tool called show the active map in the dialog and you can turn that on and off you get a better view of what you're looking at ok so then once you got your unwrap laid out and everything looks okay the unwrap looks good here what we can do is we can go to tools and we go down to render UVW template now render UVW template has a lot of defaults which you don't really have to play around with too much but the important one is the width and the height if you want to put more detail on your texture map make the number bigger and always work try and work in a square format at the power of 2 so 256 5 by 12 512 by 512 1024 by 1024 2048 by 2048 etc etc unity and other game engines work best with power of the two images power to images so please do that by default max is set to 1024 which is perfectly fine for me it's forcing two-sided which is okay so the next option is fill so you can actually fill this texture map with a solid color a normal map or a shaded color um but right now we don't really need to play around with too much with that either because it's just really changing the colors and if you leave it like this when we if you render out a PNG that's transparent you can actually overlay it in Photoshop and you can see the wireframe while you draw your texture which is really really handy and then you can obviously show edges visible edges and visible edges show seam edges and then finally you have render UV template if you click that button while everything is inside this checkerboard box that you need you can render UVW template and you get this which is perfect this is our UV map this is now what we draw on and apply to our model and it will show up perfectly so I'm gonna save this image in the top left corner you get your options save copy print etc I'm just gonna click save image I'm gonna save it to my desktop and I'm gonna save it as let's say wireframe - I'm gonna save it as type I'm gonna save it as a JPEG or PNG right now I'm gonna save it as a JPEG wireframe to save it'll ask you the quality 100% perfect okay and dump and now you're done with your object your UV map is okay I'm going to close my edit poly just by pushing the minus sign here I'm gonna close my unwrap UV and I'm going to get out of my modify panel and now I have my object and it's all unwrapped now we need to apply the unwrap so I push em to go to the material editor I'm gonna create a standard material in my left-hand side bar I'm going to double-click standard material and it's gonna create that material I double click on the title and I'm gonna give it a name and that's in the right parameter box I'm gonna call it this is called house and now it's named house and I can give it a color too so where it says ambient diffuse I can click either one of these cuz they're linked together and I will just give it a nice red color now our model isn't changing because we need to apply the texture to it we need to apply this material so I right click on the title while my object is selected here I right-click on the title and I go assign material to selection and now my model turns red anytime I change this color it will change on my model so that works out fine so far next step is right beside diffuse with the red there's a little box and if you hover above it it says none well we can click on none and we can load up a map or material and it loads up the material/map browser for us now three studio max is a lot of default material types but what we want to do is load our own image so we go to bitmap and you can double click that and it's gonna ask us to load an image from a location I saved my image to the desktop as wireframe 2 I see that here and I click on it and I look and make sure it's yacht's the 1024 it's wireframe 2 on my desktop perfect I click open so what happens is if you double click on this sphere here and if you double click on this image here you can expand it a bit you can see that that's the texture it's loaded in but it's not showing up on my model and I really really want to see a preview of it in here so what I can do is I can right click on the title again and I can scroll down the list of options until it says show shaded material in viewport if I click that and I'm gonna turn off edge traces here you can see that my material is now attached to my house I'll just move this off being a bit there you go so now if I were to open a program like paint I know paints a very very bad program but let's say I open a print paint I open up wireframe 2 and I let's say just draw something really really quick on my 3d model let's draw an arrow here you know triangle there star here let me just do a better scale star just a better example there you go you know talkbox here an arrow going up here and I'm gonna save this really quick ctrl s to save it watch what happens it's already inside 3d studio max it was loading my image file it reloaded the JPEG once it found out there was a difference and boom already done I have a texture on top of my 3d model now obviously take your time and start drawing out your text or even more and save it and then go back so that it looks like your proper 3d model now here's where some where you may run into trouble let's say I have this house and I'm going to give this another material just for a second and I'm gonna make it really really high poly by adding a mesh smooth so I'm just in the edit poly mode I'm gonna add a mesh smooth I made this ridiculously high poly put it on classic don't worry about the steps I'm doing right now I'm just making it really high poly because some of you may have high poly meshes like this you're going to run a lot of trouble because if you go to unwrap UVW what's going to happen is you're going to have a lot of polygons to play with okay and chances are it's gonna look really messed up like probably something like you know this is my entire house but it's a blob okay what you need to do is start to determine the shapes of your 3d model and break them apart into pieces using these projection maps so normally what I like doing like I said first thing I turn off ignore back-facing I'll select my entire model and I'll try and guesstimate which projection mapping type works best for me so I'll work on cylindrical right now and I go okay I'll turn on my checker pattern and I know there's also texture checker if you want the shortcut key for turning on and off edge faces on in a 3d studio max viewport click in the viewport and push f4 so I can see like okay my texture now it's looking pretty wonky the roof and some of the sides look really really bad so I'm gonna detach my roof just for a second so I'm gonna take away just about that yeah that's my roof I'm gonna tools knees break so I break apart my roof everything else is okay I kind of don't mind this but there's a big problem with it everything's kind of stretched out now I can use my scale tool but I still notice some stretching you know in all these different parts things are not looking so great so what I can do is I'm going to use a special tool called tools relax and what it will do is it will smooth out the polygons in the 2d space to match what it looks like in your 3d space there are three different modes to relax Tools is relaxed by polygon angles relaxed by edge angles and relaxed by centers now centers is normally meant for you know spherical objects but what I want is relaxed by a let's say I'll try edges start relaxed and you can see my models trying to start relaxing itself is trying to smooth out but it didn't do that great of a job in some places but other places it did pretty good you can see it's starting to look more like a checkerboard you can see what it looked like before on these edges and if I start relaxed and stop again everything is looking a little a little bit better now this is going to help you quite a bit so we're gonna try polygons angles you know polygons angles looks like it's squishing everything a little bit better now there are certain places that's still gonna have trouble for instance my doorway is still having trouble so I'm gonna have to obviously take more time grab different polygons relax for instance um I might just take away the entire doorway detach and use the break tool here and move this away and I'm gonna relax just these portions so that on its own and that on its own and you can see I get a much better result so the more I detached and the more I can I can weld it back together afterwards because I'm not worried about that because literally you can see if I touch these polygons the same thing happens with the vertexes before a member of vertex turns blue if you grab one vertex and its partner vertex is there this is the same thing that happens with edges and polygons this one turns blue on this edge because it's telling me hey this polygon is actually a partner the the polygon you're selected is actually a partner with this edge so you can weld them together later on see I can this polygon all three of these edges should go here and I can weld it together and put it back together again so even though you break things apart you can weld them back together again after you're done unwrapping so if I keep breaking these apart and I'm like okay tools and use break I'm gonna relax this part I'm gonna let it relax for a little bit remember you can change the iteration amount iterations the amount of the strength of the relaxing and the stretching it can do and you can just stop it after a few seconds normally at its best but you can see I can just grab this grab all this and showing me the edges - well - here and this one is now showing me all the edges to weld into here so if I grab this and I bring it really really close well I can weld these back together again by going tools vertex and target weld and now instead of being two separate pieces that I relaxed I can weld them back together and you can see those seam lines are disappearing so now my texture is gonna look a lot better if I just smoothing things out themselves and if I weld these together I can relax it yet again and make sure that all these polygons are looking smooth so it's you know unwrapping is all about taking your time there are different methods that work for different people and for me even though it's a little bit tedious the projection mapping I think is some of the best manual results and I think if you learn this process first before trying to do anything - - automatic you're gonna get the hang of it a lot quicker so just you know take your time practice with it unwrap your objects and your assignments and I'm sure you'll get a good look see I just relaxed it one more time now everything is flush over here and now I just got to keep doing it - the different parts of my 3d model and keep welding them together because my next step is I'll grab these parts here and I'll reweld it to this part here excetera you go on and on like that so the three tools to memorize are well target weld which you left-click and drag one vertex to another to weld it you break apart your objects in different pieces so you can work easier together now we can use stitch selected but I like to use the weld for now because stitching is kind of like I'll show you guys that a little bit later on when we get more detailed and then relaxing to help you smooth out polygons to match the 3d object better if it's more complicated and then there's render UVW template which helps you render out your UV so that you can use it and you can see remember that I only see this portion because if that's the only part that's in this blue box here so remember that you can only render what's in this checkerboard box right here don't forget the checker pattern at the top to look at your 3d model in that checker pattern please don't forget you can turn this on and off and just play around with it have a great time with it re watch this tutorial if you're having a lot of trouble or even look up different tutorials different people have different methods of working this is going to be something that's going to take time so take your time with it and thanks for watching I'll see you in class next time I see

Channel: BitHalo

Views: 15,523

Keywords: projection, unwrap, 3ds, max, tutorial, weld, break, relax

Id: NL0PaVZu1hM

Length: 28min 51sec (1731 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 22 2016