Advanced Maya UV Mapping - Straight UV Techniques

hi and welcome to vfx tutors i'm josh and in this tutorial we're just going to go over some of the more complex uving techniques that i used um whilst doing this uh model you can see that now i've finished the uving so hopefully soon that we should be on go on to the texturing stage but for this one i'm just going to quickly go through probably this one bit that might be a little bit complicated it's not too complicated but there's a couple little things that i used to um sort of make it correct and it was just this bit here so you can isolate that and you can see it's nicely uv'd now and we've got our uvs that are wrapping around here and wrapping around here as well so now if we go to our uv editor just gonna i will do a uv layout as well of how i've laid all this out so you can see these are all straight so you're thinking about why i've had problems with this and we want really big problems there's just a couple little techniques that you can use to um get these straight so what i'm going to do i'm just going to uh delete the uvs and do it again so uv just so you can see the sort of problems i had so delete the ev's got no evs now i'll just do a camera base so like with all of them just going to go through the same thing let's just turn our default material on and i'm going to go through and i'm going to collect that inner edge of these bubbles i'm just double double clicking selecting all those edge loops holding ctrl shift to select more just minimize that for now so you press f to focus in on it just in case it's not zooming too well until you've got that edge and they'll be highlighted on the ones that you can sort of see that you selected make sure you get these middle ones it's quite a lot of edge loops to select so now we've come into this sort of section here so what i'm gonna do i'm just gonna go to my uv tool kit and select cut so now i've cut those edges there and you can see them highlighted because the way this is sort of built this is going to be the end and you know on stainless steel it's kind of got the grooves in the in the metal the texture so we want to make sure that that's flowing the right way so obviously they'd be going following it around so we have to make sure that this is a separate part you're probably thinking this is actually probably quite easy to do and yeah most of it is pretty pretty easy so i'm just going to cut that i'm just going to go to the so i'm going to select this edge i don't want to cut these out as well let's cut all the way around which is what we want um we can leave that's probably fine let's just cut that just so we're not having loads in our selection and if we get stuck we just press f to focus in on our edges so i'm just going around selecting all my seams i want to cut i probably should show you what automatic looks like um it never looks particularly great so just select that edge loop and i've probably missed some but we can find them quite easily in the in the uv editor so i'm just going to cut that over my uv editor cool now i'm just going to start select my uv shells control u just gonna pull this out the way control u again i'm just gonna not worry about the size at the moment just want to make sure that these are all disconnected and they're still connected around here so i think we forgot to actually cut those edges just select on one and if we've cut too many we can just resell it it's not a problem so let's just cut that let's select our uv shell now we can see if we unfold this ctrl u we start to get these curves obviously we don't want that flat so we'll probably flatten straighten that out so i'm just going to organize all this out the way we've got some slight curvature there but it's not as big as these two bits here which seem to not split or they're on top of each other over here let's just check something by pulling that there's no we'll have a look at that in a minute now we need to just cut these it's pretty simple to do i'm just going to select an edge on all of them just double click try and slip edges where there's not huge curves unless it's the perfect cylinders not that it particularly matters i'm just double double clicking on it then i'm just gonna select cut select all of it ctrl u that's all unwrapped apart from one i'm just gonna select the edge cut and ctrl u to unfold that and all kind of crazy angle don't worry about that for now we can just select them all and we can scroll down and select orientate shells that's where you want to pick which direction you want your directional sort of materials to go so like grain stuff i always tend to always always have it left to right everyone's everyone's different but and it doesn't really matter per se all that matters is that you have it consistent so if you're having grain materials as in like directional so like wood grain or metal texture make sure you've got it either going left to right or up and down don't mix them because it'll make it very difficult or make it difficult it's just a very annoying thing to have to reorientate your uv shells because you didn't keep them orientated one way cool so let's just investigate these bits okay so that is still on there because we just cut it too much off i think yeah so let's just reset that back on doesn't matter some a little bit wonky we're gonna unfold it again so resetting that and control u cool so now we've got all these parts and most of them are pretty straight apart from these ones and you'll get this quite a lot you'll have these edges so if we turn on default material and obviously the issue of this let's center on it to try and get good view that if we put a directional texture on if we put a directional texture on this it's not going to follow it it's just going to curve down so we need to make sure ever all our uvs are straight as possible so one of the tools that we can use is literally just straight and uv so we can go straight in uvs and it will straighten them all out but then you'll have some sort of problems here which you'll need to fix so if you just select optimize things it's sort of breaking sometimes so you might need to control you undo that and you can try again see if it makes a better result but imagine it's probably do the same thing so what we wouldn't want to do is either try and split this because this is obviously going to a shorter edge and because it's on the edge it doesn't matter so much so we're going to cut that again select the uv shells ctrl u and unfold and that's almost that out we can orientate it and now let's use the straighten you always want when you use a straight you always want to check your edges because sometimes it does overlap things that you don't see so we can select optimize straight away afterwards and it will sort of relax that whenever i use straight and uvs always do an optimize after cool so we've got that now pretty straight and it's looking really good so let's do the same for this let's orientate it straighten ev's it's done the same thing so we can optimize it again straighten evs then optimize again you want to make sure you orientate it because it's still kind of broken over here and you can keep going backwards between straight and unfold and you won't get what you want so what we can do is i didn't do it on this first one when i first did this it actually did it quite a lot on all of this so um it's not doing it as bad so um so in this what i'm gonna do i'm just gonna select my this sort of inner edge here because this is the longest edge the reason why i'm so it's better to explain it because um as this slopes in it's actually going to be shorter so i want my longer edge first and the reason why i'm selecting my longer edge so i'm going to select this and then use straighten uv and you can sort of see it's you know actually what we'll do go to uv show on control u it's not worked so well we're straightening uvs on that this is what it was doing before it was um and what might be happening with you so it kind of straightens it but it doesn't do it in a very good way sometimes let's just undo that and see if i can actually recreate that again straighten uvs yeah so this was the problem i was having before it was just not working so the easiest thing i could do is once you've done this after every time you straighten your uv you want to optimize it and obviously now we can just do straighten uv and it will still do the same thing so i'm just going to select optimize so it relaxes it then i go to my vertex and i'm just going to i'm just going to select these vertices here and what i can do now because i've got these flat i'm going to edit pin selection so now that's this that's stuck there that's not going to move so now i can go to my uv shell press ctrl u and it will unfold it and now you can see that it's sort of it's spreading the sort of straightening out so now if i edit unpin all then straighten uvs it's it's sort of done it but it's working its way further out so you've probably figured out what we're going to do here so if it's like optimize again so it relaxes it good vertices vertex obviously you don't want to select ones right up to the edge because that's probably got some not so straight bits so i'm just selecting those go edit pin selection uv shell control u to unfold it and go edit unpin and straighten uvs again so now start to work out the kinks and then i'll go optimize and you can see now we've got pretty much a perfectly straight edge now and we can need to go and check things like this so if we optimize it it's always good whenever using straight and always check always check your sort of type bevels because it will sometimes it will just like straighten over the top and you'll have overlapping uh uvs which does not go well in um [Music] some sort of texture software like substance it can break the baking but cool yeah so that's pretty much it and we'll go through and we'll do the other one so we don't need to unwrap that again we can just cut that where we were before uv shell control u and that one works pretty well make sure i orientate it straighten uvs then optimize afterwards so it's not got any kinks that's fine it's not going to get straight and uv and it's kind of breaking so i'm just going to do that orientate the shell cool so it's done again it's going to select the vertices edit pin selection uv shell ctrl u to unfold edit on panel select and straighten uvs um i think we can actually just change this just looking at that i don't think that helps no let's leave that okay so let's just carry on let's go vert six edit pin selection ctrl u on panel straighten uvs and optimize then you want to orientate cool like i say before always check your type bevels because it could overlap and we're pretty much done like these bits are what we'll do is select all of our shells then i'll just go to my text density and set them so they're all the same it's not just going to quickly uh organize them just so we can have a quick look and we're pretty much done this should be a pretty quick tutorial on how to do little complex shapes i'm just going to pull this over and organize this cool so we've got a lot let's see and i always like to sort of when i organize my evs because i shift them around quite a lot i always try to work in a my longest sort of cube section so at the moment i'm going to work in a 2x2 so i'm going to select these i'm just going to organize them so they're nice and tidy and some people like to put them really light pixel type um i sometimes leave gaps it's not it's not like games where you have to be like yeah you have to really optimize your ev space you still have to do that on vfx it's just you have more flexibility in vfx i guess because you can use way more udems but having good uh uv housekeeping i guess would be good it would be cool it's um good and people appreciate it especially texturists or if you're texturing it just just helps and i'll go through after this one i'll go through my because i've now finished eating it and i'll go through um my uv layout and what i've done so you get an idea of my sort of methods behind some of those bits some of the uvs i guess and and after that we're pretty much done on the uv side of it we just got to texture it then do all the other bits so you can sort of see got lots of dead space here and i can sort of pack that in i can use this a bit wisely cool obviously we want to be in the first obviously that's for the pixel that's the textual density that i've been using throughout the project so don't worry about that so now we can see that all our uvs are really good and they're all all curving around so if we did put a uh directional texture on there it would go around so like the edge of the sort of the metal sort of shading would work pretty well so yeah that was a pretty quick tutorial but if you um enjoyed that uh hit that like button and subscribe for more like this you

Channel: VFX Tutors

Views: 390

Keywords: Maya UV map tutorials, uv map tutorial, UV mapping, How to UV map in Maya, how to UV in Maya, how to uv 3d model, beginners uv tutorial, maya uv

Id: 7L6s8fa_YO4

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021