Autodesk Maya 2014 Tutorial | UV Mapping - Part 1

in this movie we're going to take a look at UV mapping UV mapping is the process of taking UV points from a surface and placing them flat to describe a mapable area essentially they provide a holdout area for images to be placed we cannot paint directly onto our surface therefore we need to apply you these in order to allow painting you could kind of think of them as a clean sheet of paper being wrapped around your polygon object now the goal of UVs is to make them human readable what this means is that we'll be able to look at our flattened two-dimensional UV set and be able to decipher individual pieces and parts now sometimes the pieces and parts are a little too small or a little too fragmented to really know what they are but part of keeping them human readable is merely making sure that they're rotated properly and organized in a neat manner and they're not just a large cluster of individual edges and points to begin I want to make sure that my model is nice and clean I'll switch over to the channel box you can see that I've got a lot of transforms there and we've also got some history so let's start by choosing edit delete by type history and also modify freeze transformations now let's go ahead and open up the UV texture editor I'm going to open the editor into a specific viewport I'll choose panels panel UV texture editor and let's go fullscreen and we'll zoom out when we go into our UV texture editor we see that we have a grid in the middle of our space this grid shows us the 0 to 1 texture space we have 4 quadrants here but only one is the true 0 to 1 texture space we can use all of the space that we see here even outside of our grid in order to map our UVs but typically we'd like to try and keep things within this region once we map all of our UVs into this region then we can move them around and use multiple regions for our crow model we'll focus just on our true 0 to 1 texture space and you can see the number values there down at the bottom we have 0 and it goes over to 1 in a graph like fashion this bottom row of numbers represents the U direction and these numbers here ascending 0 to 1 show us the V direction now these white lines here are the actual UVs or a UV set we have these on our model as a result of starting with an object that had ups when we create a primitive object such like a sphere or a cube there is an option there for having you these placed on the primitive once you create it when we built our crow the primitive object that we chose to start with had UVs on it so as we built the model out those UVs just kind of expanded into the shape that you see there now we don't need these UVs and they're really just junk we'll just ignore them and start laying out UV s for the rest of our character so we'll switch back to our perspective and to begin the UV process we start by selecting faces once we have groups of faces selected will then choose a projection that matches that selection in order to project the UVs onto the surface so let's take a look at how this process works and a right click and go to face and we'll project you v's for the wing and i'm going to grab all of the faces that make up this side of our character's wing and let's switch back over to the polygons menu set and our UV tools are located under create UVs at the very top let's break this window off in the very top section here we have all of our different types of projection methods we're going to go through several of these but for the wing I think it'll be best to use create UVs based upon camera now what this will do is project you these based upon my camera view so I want to orient my camera view so that I am best viewing all of the faces that I want to project I'm going to turn my grid off so we can see things a little better and there I can see all of my face is selected with the exception of the faces on the backside of the wing we're going to have to deal with those a little bit separately as we project this those back UVs are going to overlap with the front you v's let's choose create UVs and we'll close the window and now we have a planar projection that has been added and now we'll switch over to my UV texture editor to see the results of our projection and what we have here are the selected polygon faces if I right click I can go to you thee and then that will show me all of the UVs of the selected model so now I see those junk you V's that were there before as well as my projected wing you v's since you've E's often overlap in our UV texture editor we can grab just a small portion of a UV set and choose select select shell to choose all of the UVs that are interconnected this makes sorting out and selecting our UV shells a lot easier I'll hit W then we can just move our UVs like we would move a normal object and we'll just slide those out and we're just moving these off into empty space and this empty space here this allows us a big vast area to work in now since I projected the front of the wing as well as the back of the wing I have overlapping UVs I need to split those apart now we can actually see when we have overlapping UVs by going to image and checking shade you v's let's frame this up and here we can see that we have kind of a strange color and what we really should be seeing is either an all blue color or an all red color but we get somewhat of a purple type color there where we're mixing red and blue and that's because we're seeing the back faces which were red and then the front faces which are blue and thick because they're sitting on top of each other we're getting that blending between the colors to split these apart I'll go back out into the viewport my shaded perspective view I'm going to right click and choose edge and I'm going to double click on the edge loop that is dividing my model in half make sure that that grabbed it all and really I only care about the edge loop that goes around the wing I don't really care that anything else got selected because I haven't mapped any of those you v's yet I'll switch back to my UV texture editor and I'm going to choose cut and this will separate the UVs along that selected edge now we can also choose from the polygons menu from within the UV texture editor cut UV edges either one of these will work basically the same thing we'll choose cut and that will split those edges that I have selected away now because I had the entire body edge loop selected it also cut all of these you these over here in my zero to one texture space but again since I haven't mapped any UVs yet I don't really care that any of those are being cut I will eventually have to reproject all of those UVs there so we're not too concerned about those if I cut these properly I'll be able to separate these two shells so let's right-click a go to UV and I'll just click on a single UV and choose select select shell and we'll slide that off and now we can clearly see our two different colors and our front wing and our back wing now our UV shells here look pretty good but before we can really call them finished we want to try and smooth those you've ease out and we want to smooth them based upon an unfolding operation that matches our model this tool is located right here we have an icon for the smooth UV tool let's select the front of our wing here first and I'll click on this tool and that's going to place me into an interactive mode inside of that tool itself and the smooth UV tool gives us two options unfold and relax the one we want is unfold this one here will allow me to interactively try to reposition the UVs based upon the UVs local space on the model this saves me a lot of time that I don't have to try to guess or manually push you these around to try to match it up to the model that it came from so we'll choose unfold and to operate this tool I'll just click on the unfold name and scroll left to right when I bring it to the right it actually runs the operation if I bring it back to the left it will act as an undo so we have an intermediate area there that we can kind of look and see what is going to work best so this is without any unfold and then we can gradually see those changes as we move to the right for the most part moving all the way to the right is going to give you decent results so I'm going to just bring that all the way over and then go to the second wing and we'll try the same thing and I'll choose unfold and then when I bring this one all the way over we see the wing kind of crumbles explodes and then scales way out but in the end it still looks good but what has happened here is that since the object itself or this UV shell was flipped and we had that red color the unfold tool had to invert the UVs first and then smooth them out so I'm going to just undo that completely and you can see now we go back to that red color so prior to doing my unfold smooth I'm going to flip these you v's so that they're facing the right way and so that will turn blue for us we can flip the UVs by using any one of these two icons right here one will flip horizontally the other will flip vertically or one will flip in the V and the other will flip in the U I really just want to flip this in the U that again gives me kind of the opposite side of the wing and then we'll choose unfold and smooth that out and you can see that now it doesn't try to invert and then rescale so overall here our unfold tool is going to minimize any distortion that will come from the UV shell or come from our UV projection our goal here remember is to be able to paint within these UV areas so if the UV shell doesn't match back to our model we're going to end up with Distortion and this can be in the form of a texture looking like it's stretched or even pinched so for instance I'll select just a UV here I'm gonna hit W which will then back me out of the unfold tool but if I had this UV here where we can see this is where it should live but if I had it all the way over here when I try to paint in between this area or in between these two you v's the color that I put there is going to be compressed or pinched in between those two UVs because the actual space and let's undo should be like that so this here is more representative of the space that's on the model the further we deviate from that shape the original shape of our model the more distortion we're going to get out of our texture

Channel: O'Reilly - Video Training

Views: 27,517

Keywords: animation, video, motion, tutorial, animate, modeling, autodesk, help, training, cgi, akn_include, how to, models, materials, compositing, lighting, effects, titles, 3D, videos, textures, Autodesk Maya, keyframes, cg

Id: 5e1LNO0f7LE

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 29 2013