Basic 3DS Max unwrapping workflows - EASY MODE

hey my name is Tim Ramage and in this video I will show you some basic workflows I used to unwrap my 3d models in 3ds max for this video I'm using 3ds max 2017 so let's get started I have one of my models open here with the unwrap modifier and I will show you some basic workflows I used to create this kind of unwrap okay so as you can see this is the Edit UVW screen how do you get there let's go back to the beginning let's collect this collapse disk and select a 3d model and the first thing you want to do is go to your modifier list scroll down all the way down to unwrap UVW it's important that you pick this one and up this one and as you can see now you have the unwrap UVW modifier on top of that and you see this these green green lines in there and the next thing is to open the UV editor so a UV unwrap is needed for your freedom a 3d model if you want to give your model a texture map and texture map is basically a 2d painted or generated image that you can rap unto your 3d model I can show you an example of the worm you can see here on the right with the texture on that on it as you can see it is a colorful drooling worm right now this is d text your map you saw before and 3ds max but now with all that painted stuff on there this piece of software is called substance painter you can use this to do texture your model so you can see the only UV Islands here to paint the details and everything stays within this square that's important to notice all right back to 3ds max I've selected this a cube and edit E and map modifier on top of that and as you can see here is to our square but there is only one square here you can click on the faces to to select them what will happen if you start painting on this it's very easy what you paint it with in this area will be projected onto the 3d surface so in this case if I start painting a dot here on the left upper side there will be a dot here on the 3d model on the upper left side however since this face is using the same UV coordinates it's also showing a dot here on the upper left side and the same here if we select this one it will be projected on here so make sure to don't overlap your eupbs so in this case all the six phases are overlapping each other and this can be useful in some occasions but for this we generally don't want that so how do we separate them from each other we can do is we can just select this and move this away and as you can see like a little magic trick all the boxes are coming out of the center here you can move everything outside of the outside of the box but please remember that the texture is going to take place within this checkered square so now we have all the phases here and what we can do is just select this scroll down and place them within this square and if we paint within this a little square we can draw something here and then we have something else this area of the UV map and then we can paint individually on this on this plane however if as you can see there is a lot of unused space right now so this is not being used is it's not being used you want to fill in the UV space as much as possible because this will be put into a 2d texture to the plane a painted texture and that will have a pixel resolution for example 1024 times 10 to 1024 or 512 X 512 which means your pixels are limited so you have to keep in mind the texture resolution so for example let's say we have one we are using one texture map of 512 by 512 pixels so 512 by 512 pixels and we have this little square here if you make that this size it will use about 265 pixels by 265 pixels but because it's only using 1/4 of the old texture but if we get another side here and we have that one small or smaller half of that is only using 128 pixels by 128 pixels which means that the resolution of the texture on this area is smaller so it's it's important to have your size you know the size of the island so these under phases consistent in size there's a neat trick to see if your pixel size is consistent and that's with the checker map so yeah this one and I prefer this one so now you can see and it's projecting the image within the UV space onto the 3d surface so if I scale the sound to only four squares you can see is projecting these four checker squares onto this face and this one for example is a lot larger so it's using a lot more pixels and you have a lot more resolution texture resolution if you skill is up you will increase the size but that means you have to decrease the size of the other faces and that's not what you want you want to keep them as consistent as possible the square sizes if we go to the collapses to show you if I go to the worm here at my own wrap modifier go to the checkered pattern Ida wireframe you can see all the squares are about the same size around the whole model we can go to reference to JC take a thali 210 works Alva and I can concede better so if for example this was smaller the squares will be way bigger than the the other areas here and that means I have less resolution here texture resolution to paint on that's not what we want cool let us get back to our square here so we want to evenly distribute the faces and we want to place all within this object also we have to keep in mind our seams so as you can see the green lines are seems the this one let me go to these two these two are next to each other as you can see here this is the left face and it's just the right face but it is cut in half there is a literally a seam in here and you can see whether where the seam should be it's blue to see where it is connected that's this line so [Music] what we can do with this is it's as imagine you want to make a straight line in the texture from this face to this face so and these are like positioned like this you start drawing here draw a straight line and then you have to go to this face and start drawing here again but as you can imagine it can be really difficult to perfectly align that so in this case I used to you should stitch these two planes together you can do that by stitching here in the the lower area of the NDTV panel you can select vertices edges or polygons and this is basically the same as in the modifier tab so vertices are all that the dots are edges are lines and the polygons are the faces [Music] you can toggle between those three by using the numbers one two and three on your keyboard okay so let's go to this edge here as well as you can see the aligning that from the stitch is turning blue now while having this edge selected you can right click and click stage selected it will look for the blue line and it will stitch it together and as you can see now they move together and not separate anymore so in this case I can just draw a line here and it will perfectly align on the 3d model as well and as you can see there is no green line here anymore there isn't a seam so and that's this is are we going to how we are going to unwrap the whole box actually so you can also go to edge here and click on the 3d model itself so what you can see [Music] it's aligning these two of these events so in this case the sizes are off so when I stitch this it's trying to get an average size between this polygon and this polygon but this is not believable what we want you guys have to go to this checker map we can see the squares are evenly sized China but they are deforming here you can see if I stop moving the texture or the TV area it starts deforming if I turn this square unit into a strange shape here you can see deep you feed before that's about what we want so let's select this one again and right-click it and break it so if you break it we will cut it loose from the rest and then we can move it away as you can see where we have a seem arrogant so how do we get this back into a square and how do we evenly sized this we can do that by using two relax - it's on the tools in a drop-down or relax the default settings are fine relax by polygons for this face you don't really have to change this you can just press Start relax and then it relaxes to the original shape on the 3d model okay if we are happy with it we can apply it and now it is perfectly square again let's do that for this one as well we can select them both go to tools start relax stop working and apply so now they are square again the only problem now is that they are unevenly skilled versus simple tool here in the arrange elements where you can rescale all the UV Islands relatively to each other so with the risk and selected just click on this like normalize and now they are all normalized within the UV space within with the same with its same size this is also the thing we will be using to pack all your fees together in the end so let's distress together so now we can grab this border again right click stitch selected and as you can see [Music] we get this nice origami box think of it as a paper model you have to unfold so you can draw on this okay so at the bottom side it's there there's no way to avoid the seams just keep that in mind you are going to have seams but you have to plan them and make sure they are in a or a good position so for example for this for this worm make sure the seam of the Dexter is around a corner that's difficult to see in a game for example if the game is from this perspective you won't be able to see a seam under his mouth for example I also have a big seam around his back because you won't see his back in one and you will do your best to avoid the seam in in the texture as you can see it's not the best example you still have seen here something I really need to fix but that's the seam here honest on his back you can't afford that okay so now we have a red box and we can bring this model into substance or whatever I can let me quickly show you that so I have imported the box into substance painter and as you can see I have the box here and you fee map here so we can do now this start painting on this face and as you can see it's painted projected what's the other way around you can start painting on this face and is projected on the 3d model in this area we can paint on the top and we can paint on the bottom look at the bottom and there it is and as you can see now you can just draw a straight line here from this point to this point and I will be will we find okay so this is an example for a geometrical shape in this case a box and if you have other geometrical shapes the workload is pretty much the same [Music] there is some difference though if you have a model that's is still pretty square but have some let me just quickly shape this up into something else like like this for example [Music] now we add a unwrap modifier in your drop-down go to unwrap UVW and go to the open UV editor and as you can see we still have this box thingy and the seams are all everywhere and this is not going to look good so the first thing you need to do is just select all the faces I'm using ctrl a to select all faces and including projection and click planar map so again let's get the checker map here this is not very useful it's only projecting the upper side okay so we need to figure out a way to get a decent UV map in here so let's move everything out of the box first and then we're going to look okay we going to have this plane so I'm selecting faces select bolt control and click other faces to select the rest they will turn red if you're selected obviously and now what these face is selected you click on planar mapping again so it's separated it automatically breaks and separated let's move this over there and let's do that for the other faces we want si island as well so let's select these two planar map them answer okay before continuing we can see it's completely flat you can use the planar map and then align it to in this case the y axis so it's projecting from this to this you can see the y axis here to green arrow and the same we can do the same for this area by the way after clicking the planar map let's do it on see the z axis for now so it's projecting from top to bottom however as you can see that squares as our our stretch here because it's projecting from here and this wall needs to be relaxed too to protect correctly so let's go to tools press relax and start relax and apply so now it stretches the shape correctly okay go to the other faces this one this one click protect my move outside of the box click project on the X move outside of the box get the bottom project on Z so we have all the islands we want out however the sizes are inconsistent and a little bit stretched as you can see on the bottom here so will be we will do first is get all the faces and relax them together so everything is evenly skilled now evenly relaxed and not distorted we can go back to the rescale elements here and rescale them to the year to the same sizes okay so next thing is let's get this shape and turn it around you can use this you can just wrote rotate it when you have this freeform mode you can rotate it around that like that but you can also just flip it like this so we have the up so if the upper side here [Music] again okay so we have the upper right side there upper left of there let's go to the edge mode we can select multiple edges here so I selected these two right click a stitch like that I stitch them together [Music] we can select this one [Music] this one over here for the rooftop Oh [Music] move tough it's not a house but you know looks like house and now we have something similar as long as the box okay and everything stitched together and let's kill this down you can hold control and skill to keep the right dimensions of the island so you don't squash it like this because as you can see you feel gets messed up okay let's collapse this now let's just remove this so this geometrical shape what if we have a more organic shape like this shoulder piece I did in one of my other tutorials so let's add the unwrapped modifier open UV editor and as you can see it's already unwrapped however [Music] that's just good language as you can see there is no seams right now and it might be tempting to start texting like this however as you can see there are a lot of overlapping overlapping borders right now so if you're going to paint on here you will also paint the same details on the other side that's not what we want that's why that's why we are going to cut this up to make some separate UV Islands okay actually the the same methodology applies here what we can do is think about where we want the shape we can select the faces [Music] or lest you just do it like this as an example we can select this area I checked the ignore back-facing mask so check the ignore back-facing so I can select the other side as well if that's not activated and I selected like this I'm not selecting the other side it might be useful in some cases so let's select that like this [Music] deselect this area so now we have one area selected here we can do now is just simply add the planar projection again here we go as you can see we have a seam here with with the green line however the squares a little bit deformed so what we do now is go to tools relax and start relax and now you see that the nice organic shape relaxing to make the squares as square as possible so and we can start painting on this now you have some details on there [Music] let's do the same for this area so I'm planning out on the 3d model itself what I want as my UV Islands okay so I want I want to hold up a part here [Music] this is not how I what I used for the final model and I will show you in a second but let's select this on the 3d model and as you can see it's overlapping right now with the other pieces of with this selected we press on planar map again move this outside to see what we are doing as you can see that the squares are really messed up right now oh if the event is annoying by the way you can press f2 to toggle between the red field color and the red lines can be useful to see your model a little bit better all right let's go to tools relax and just start relaxing you can see it stretching correctly and this squares are more evenly distributed by them [Music] to do the relax we need a we need a seaman because it's literally stretching out the whole model and we can I can show you that by using the pelt map the belt map is here on the right if I have some more difficult shapes than these planes for example this leftover shape I can do Pelt map do so so I click on this and it's basically in combination of cutting the island out of the model and relaxing so I start belt and as you can see you have all these strings attached the start is it's is it's stretching the model around these Strix stop the belting and click the start relax and after Lexington correct shape [Music] okay so I didn't pick this way of unwrapping or I didn't pick this way of the V layout because I have a seam in here so ever want to paint some details from this area in this area is going to be really difficult so if you want to use this as a UV map which you perfectly can because the squares are evenly distributed the scale is off this one has a lot more resolution oh if you before for continued you can select by element you know with this with this button so it's it's difficult to select everything right now because there's another island underneath it so you can activate select by element and then you can just click on this one and move it here so the resolution this one is a lot bigger so we need to tune it down a little bit and let's just use this again to scale them all to evenly skill them all so the problem here is that we have a lot of wasted space again so if we want to paint on this all this checkered areas will not be used in the text and that's a waste of space we don't want to waste that so we can do now is do some kind of jigsaw puzzle madness we can move this into a smaller square something like this then we can select all the planes go to the one of the corners and then we can scale them all together to keep the size consistent so we have a lot less sweaty wasted space there is still some wasted space left so let's see what we can do to avoid that and it's not always possible sometimes you just have to deal with it [Music] now it's even worse so what you can do if you want to avoid it so if you want a bigger texture resolution you have to make a decision do I want last actualize resolution or do I want AC because I can can grab this and the activities select half of this and break this piece so I have two separate islands I can [Music] position is like this and that one over there now we can do that same for this one break this position is me and tiara here make sure in this kind of area still not overlap the UVs [Music] [Music] position it like that and I can already see this is not going to save me some size [Music] so this is why I call as a jigsaw puzzle to just move around the shapes to get a ideally ideal way of distributing this like that and now we have this shape left and we can also break this one up [Music] and now we can scale this into that UV space again so as you can see there's a lot less wasted space right now we have more textual resolution to work with we can use a higher texture however we have more seams so if we want a line from this side to this side it's a little bit more difficult to get a straight line however software like substance painter makes this easier because you can also paint on the 3d model itself so if I start painting here it's projecting the the paint on on both sides see so if you're using substance painter or other software like 3d code the seams like this seam don't really matter so if you want a higher text resolution you can just break pieces up and and do it like this okay so one more important thing is I said please don't overlap you your movies however you can use that to mirror things so let me explain that no we don't need to collapse it let's just reset this model like this oh no I mean yeah that's just collapses okay let's pretend we want to mirror this object so we have a smaller text resolution but we want some I take a high level details on this and both sides are going to be the same we're not going to unwrap this whole face and then have some ID tail texture here and we have to have the same amount of texture detail here to get that we have to double the size in the text resolution but since they are the exact same we can we can copy that so let's just remove half of the model here and get the unwrapped modifier here and let's separate this first and let's separate the bottom and top first so let's select this bottom area [Music] Oh what order to separate so that bottom and this bottom so we will make sure to have a seam here on the bottom of the shoulder pattern which the player will hardly see okay so we can use the planar map again move that away select the rest and use the planar map again or use a pal Maps and select belt start belt so it's stretching everything relax this into a [Music] nice shape [Music] let's get this one and relax that we can relax this one select everything scale is the same size let's position this within that latina square [Music] let's check if the exercise is consistent yes it is [Music] scale this up so what this means is that we can start painting half of the model now and then when we mirror this to the other side we have a full piece again go to the other qualifier and obviously we have a seam right here but it still looks the same right that's because it's layered on top of this so everything we paint on one side will be projected on the other side as well you can see if I select this one it's the same as this one because it's perfectly overlapping [Music] let me export this to substance to show this so here I have the our piece loaded [Music] as an example I can show you when I paint on this area or now let's let's just paint let's get some nice red color paint on this and as you can see because the UVs are overlapping it's also projecting this on the other side because here [Music] a bottom and again it's mirroring history other side as well so overlapping overlapping your fees can be very useful but only if you want it all right the final thing I want to show you is that you can draw your own seams with with the pal function which you occasionally need so I can share an example in which case maybe this let's get the I wrap modifier on here let's just select all and just destroy the unwrap it's always fun to destroy stuff all right the first thing is one a nice tip and that's when you are unable to move this it's a very strange thing and maybe I'm doing something wrong but I have this since Max 2009 or whatever older older version this is selected but I'm unable to move this I can be really annoying so switching this doesn't make any sense doesn't really help but just switch to vertex or edge mode and go back to polygon mode I just do that by pressing 1 and 3 quickly and then now I'm able to move it so if you are unable to move it maybe that's not the case with your version but if you are unable to move it switch between modes right here and then you will be able to move it again cool [Music] okay let's rewind that rewind rewind and share the example let's kill the worm detaches hat and Shirley example with with this one so go to the unwrap modifier let's store this again so let's say we have this upper area or the lower area here let's break this apart and now if you want to repeal this it's not going to work because it wants to stretch out this hair and this whole model out of this small blow hole and that's not going to work so what we need is another seam we can do that by painting the seams manually so we can click this and it seems and let's see here so it's cutting the model open like this instead of just manually doing this you can also use this one point to point seam you kick first point and you go all the way to this one and the light blue line says I'm going to cut this open when you press the public so let's press about that and to start health and as you can see this turned green now so it means it's it's cut open and let's relax it and now it's stretched correctly and we can do the same for for this area as well if we are stretching it right now it is it is shape is almost possible with that with normal way of of the belt however you can see some faces here overlapping and this is a problem because if we paint on this area this area it will also project on this area in this area so that's not what we want and I see this one is also broken now how did that happen it wasn't broken when I started the real as you can see just watch it back [Music] cool so let's select this go to it seems well apparently this is already cut open so we only have to cut open the rest here go to the Pelt it listens to the blue line now we can do it like this [Music] alright I hope this was somewhat useful for you I didn't call this video a tutorial on purpose because it was a mess but it's a good thing I think it's important one of the important things with unwrapping is that you don't give up and it might might sound very cheesy but unwrapping can be really stressful when you start however when you figure out the saw workflow for yourself it can be pretty relaxing actually yeah and I just showed you some ways I am using I think and I hope you can use the same ways to get a solid workflow for yourself but you really have to just open this throw the unwrap modifier on it and see what you can do with this just make sure about the things I told you work with in the UV space leave enough space between the UV Islands plan your seams what your pixel consistency [Music] and that's about it keep practicing and make this make this fun for yourself anyway I hope this was useful for you and I will see you guys in the next video take care

Channel: Tim Remmers

Views: 4,544

Keywords: Zbrush, Pixologic, timelapse, Sculpting, games, how to make games, game art, twitch, streaming, live, how to make art for games, gaming, team reptile, lethal league, art, artist, 3D, 3D Art, cg, cgi, how to, tutorial, speedsculpt, speed, dungeon, creative, streamer, game artist, how to make 3D models, diy, autodesk, 3dsmax, 3dstudiomax, maya, unwrapping, uv, help, wireframe, low poly, easy

Id: sLRAYQJCyWg

Length: 51min 48sec (3108 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2017