Blender Beginner UV Unwrapping Tutorial (Chair Part 7)

now that we've finished the modeling the real fun can begin UV unwrapping some people get excited about lighting rendering and other people get excited about UV unwrapping and those people ah psychopaths I'm joking of course but they are the sort of people that would enjoy playing Fifa manager and the farming simulator because it's about creating a system that works UV unwrapping gets a bad name because it's not creative it's the opposite of creative it's engineering almost it's the step after you finish a model that you need to complete before you can apply a texture to it because UV unwrapping and texturing intertwine basically UV unwrapping is telling the 3d software how to apply a 2d image texture which you downloaded off the internet and apply it to a 3d model and where to put it because while it might seem easy for your eyes to understand which parts of the text to go where it's not easy for the computer it has various quick methods of like box projection which kind of like blasts the texture from all sides but it very rarely does a good job of it so UV unwrapping is the preferred method UV unwrapping is placing seams in your model that tell the software how to unwrap it so the way I like to think of it is to imagine that your model is made out of paper and you want to flatten it on the table where would you place cuts in the model so in this example with this cube here you would imagine you could place a cut down there down there and unravel the thing okay that that view there of it being flattened out onto the table is what you would see when you have successfully UV unwrap something so there's a separate window it's called the UV image editor and it looks just like that then any image texture that you add to the model is then almost kind of like projected onto that what's called the UV island the UV view which then if you can imagine it was to reassemble into a cube that is where the texture would be now important to note that wherever there was a seam there is a discontinuation of the texture there was not a seam in the faces just kind of stuck together there would not be a discontinuation so generally the aim of the game is to place as many seams as necessary in order to flatten it on the table and avoid visible seams where there would be like a discontinuation of the texture where you don't want it some places you do like for example on the side of this chair like there you can see there is actually a real seam in the photo reference that's a great place to put a seam in other places you have to get away with it so for example down the side of the leg of the chair that you would place a seam because it wouldn't really matter if there was a discontinuation of it because it your eye isn't going to notice like from you know the front to the side face that there was a discontinuation so you want to place as many as you need to flatten it out without making obvious seams and in cases where you have to play seams in order to lay something flat you want to put it in areas where it wouldn't be as noticeable to the viewer now sight note I would say if you are planning on using like 3d texturing software like say substance painter this kind of like seam placement is less important because you're actually painting directly on the model so the seams aren't noticeable because it it'll paint across islands getting a little technical there but in our case we are just applying an image texture seamless image texture to the model so it makes sense to put the seams where they would conceivably be now the with the theory part of the video out of the way we can finally do a practical demonstration on our chair by UV unwrapping it for those of you who are new to this series and have just joined us because this video was titled beginner's guide to UV unwrapping or something like that we actually modeled this whole chair as part of the whole series you welcome to check out but anyways this part it's just focused on UV unwrapping so yeah this is our model this is a number of different pieces and they each need to be UV unwrapped now you could by the way I was saying you could actually make this one solid mesh one object and then UV unwrap that which is used for like video games like you have to keep things like as one object in our case we're just going to be rendering like a still image so it doesn't matter that these are actually separate objects in fact it's simpler to keep them as separate objects so just FYI let's start with the most basic of our objects and that's this little wooden slat down here so if you hit number pad forward-slash that is local view and every time I say that I keep thinking of that Kanye West song I know you ain't getting there kind of from that local dude I'll keep that in there local view local do it anyway I just listened to that the song blame game which is why I thought of that anyways this is what our mesh looks like and you can see that is only half of it because the other half is the mirror modifier which is making up the rest and it's not a good idea to UV unwrap just like one half of her and let the murder the rest because of course you're gonna get a mirrored effect of the texture which is a very very easy way to break a realism of a model when you've got a glaring mirrored texture however when you're placing UV seems you can actually save you time because you only have to place seams on one side of the mesh so we're gonna keep it active for now and then we'll we'll apply it anyways so imagining that this object was made of paper where would you place the seams the seams being the cut like where would you cut with a pair of scissors in order to unravel this thing and for one let's focus on this end piece so the end would have to be if not completely separated like joint on like one little bit in order to like flatten that bit down onto the metaphorical table uh-huh and actually this is it's gonna be like in sight like right against the chair leg anyway so whenever you have something like that that's like great perfect I'll just make that entire thing a scene because it doesn't matter that there's a seam there because it's being hidden by something else so yeah I'm just gonna select that entire thing I mean edge select mode by the way which enable you do select just the edges then with the edges selected to make that a seam you're going to go ctrl e from this drop-down you're gonna click mark seam and when you've done that you should see that that that line there is now red it was purple before because it had a crease it's blue if it has a sharpness I don't know if there's any other colors I'm sure there are but red means there is a seam I don't know how blender decides which color to give priority because it's got a crease and it's gonna seem now and seam was more priority than anyway the only other thing we need to do to unravel this like if it's it's basically a hollow tube essentially would be to do one cut somewhere on here and you know it doesn't really matter because this is like an object which you know looking at reference you can see it there's like a texture on the front and then as it goes to the top there's a different texture there so if I had to guess I think these pieces are veneer but I could be wrong I could be totally wrong I don't know but either way it doesn't really matter where we put the seam however I like to generally put seams at the back and at the bottom of models because the chances are the camera is not going to see that and not notice it as well as if I was to put it like right there so I'm gonna put it right down there control e mark seam okay and now that we've done that we can now apply our mirror modifier because I want a copy now that I've got my seams in place to the other side so in object mode you have to be an object mode if you try and do it in edit mode it'll tell you you can't do that so object mode then hit apply then uh so now we've got both sides which can now be moved independently of each other great now to UV unwrap it it helps to have the UV image editor open so you can actually see what you're doing but rather than like splitting the view and doing that there is a dedicated view right at the top there a dedicated active workspace so now that we've got that it's got the UV image editor right here now it's created one for us which I believe was based off of the default cube that it came in as but this is totally wrong so if we select everything this is in edit mode select everything then hit you and then select unwrap and that is it we have successfully unwrapped one object off a chair one part of our chair and it's now a good time to I guess check whether or not it's done properly so you should add an image that you can actually see over here there's a couple of ways you can check things but anyways this is this is the way I'd suggest so at the top here in your UV image editor if you click new then this is how you would make like a black canvas if you wanted to but you can also generate a UV grid which if we then just hit OK it looks like this now unfortunately this is like one of the I guess maybe it's probably like a carryover of like blender 2.79 but didn't it wasn't really revamped with blender 2.8 and I wish it was but it's like it's not easy to preview that UV grid over here because anyway it's just annoying so what you want to do is in your materials with your slat selected go to materials you won't have this but go ahead just add a new material and then underneath base color I click that little dot next to it I know this is getting really into the weeds and then click image texture from this little drop down here and then from this little drop down here that you can't even see the name of the box click that and then you should see one called untitled and now that we've done that if you click on that button at the top viewport shading or just Zed material preview you should now finally see your UV grid now if you have done it correctly then you will see that these are squares if they're not squares if they're stretched or whatever then that means oh you're probably gonna have stretching in your texture so that's that's why it's the UV grid because it's it's a good way to test whether or not something is properly UV unwrapped okay so let's do something a little bit harder which is gonna be this chair like here let me move this out the way so we've got a bit more space and you as well and we'll go back to solid view okay so we have a mirror modifier just like we did for this one here but ours is like it's at an angle and I also need to make a quick change up here so that this matches the things so I had to want to apply my memoir file let's bring this back and I'll apply it I've applied it and now just up here very quickly can I do it quickly I need to rotate this because with the mirror modifier you may remember those of you who have hung around since the start of this series well done but this the mirror modifier was preventing us from getting this exact angle for this chair so just positioning the view as close as I can to to get this right and something like that that's pretty good and in fact you know what I was really sold on the idea of using a face rather than empty an empty hole so I'm gonna make this a one big solid face with an F I just hit just hitting F and when you do that it will its got horrible topology right which you would never want to do because it makes like a terrible end gone and yes we are doing more modeling okay I know I said we were done with modeling but this is more but anyways it's not gonna matter because it's gonna be hidden by the chair so if I hit shift E now gonna make that a sharp edge with the crease and then it's got a horrible shading but as you may remember you can fix it by going to normals Auto smooth and that's it okay so brief little intermission there with just fixing up the model okay so where would we apply the seams for something like this well good idea to check the photo reference and see where the actual real wood actually has seams in it so we have a physical seam going here and one going here and we can see that well I think it's a solid piece of wood I'm guessing that's why it's got that kind of angle I don't think it's a veneer veneer is like where the inside is like mbf like cheap wood or whatever and then the outside has a thin layer of real wood which gives it the grain but I think this is solid wood because it's got like the cut that goes through it I think I could be totally wrong but anyways point is is that the texture wraps around that edge there so if we want to do things accurately we should work with that so let's do that so I would place a seam right here or would I or would I know you know what let's do things a little bit differently I'm going off the rails the bottom piece it always it doesn't matter because it's it's not gonna be seen by the camera so who cares oh actually that remind me one little tiny bit more of editing somebody mentioned the comments I'll Andrew when are you gonna fix the the foot of the chair or whatever and I thought ah details man details who cares about him all right let's just fix this I'll rotate one piece and then Sheerin the next piece XY Y there we go and then the same for this one that's in the background hang on oh come on oh I see this is a good idea to UM oh no I frozen something okay it's a good idea to learn a new shortcut right so you know like number pad one is like front view hold down shift number pad no no control hold down control and one and it's the other side so that was the front leg that we looked at and now I'm looking at the back leg so that's a little hotkey for you because you didn't have enough all right let's make these straight all right fun stuff okay so as I said I'm going off the rails whenever there is something that is touching the ground who cares where you put the seam just make the entire thing like one seam because that's a great way to like crack open the bottom of it see then control a maxime then the only other seam is one you just need one other seem to kind of unravel it now this is well we kind of need a little bit more because this is an interesting thing this is a curved object that goes around so I don't think we'll get away with just one but let's do a seam there let's make this other chair like a different seam as well okay so now we have this you can see the red lines indicating the seams sohow way would we do a cut so we want to keep these parts without seams if we can get away with it hmm now I will place one seam right here let's go control a maxim and I reckon we have to have another one on the other side let's do that and obviously this is now a face now so this completely hidden so that should have a seam as well control e Maxime whenever you have an opening it doesn't matter it's just treated as if it was like a solid seem like it can just completely unwrap there's no problem at all that's why having empty faces is actually sometimes desirable but anyways let's see how this looks okay so I'll select everything I'm gonna hit you and then select unwrap okay so this shows us if we were to have a look oh we have two we'll give it the material I'll select that control dubby ctrl L to select the last object and then copy the material so you can see with this we've got stretching horrible stretching which means we are not done by Faja especially at the top yet gosh that's that's terrible so there's no seam that goes down here so yeah we'll give one right there control e mark seam that should clear it up a lot ok it has that's good mm-hmm you know what I'm just gonna give a seam right here even though I mean you can only do so much right without like spending hours on it if a client was like we cannot have a seam there then yeah you'd like fart around with a bunch of a bunch of things and you'd have a blast doing it I'm sure but look at that that's that's really pretty well done it I think oh and then of course we also have the seams that you know it's like a it's like a gift from God we have an actual seam in our real object to help us it's like it's a constant game of like how few seams can I get away with because the seams are generally undesirable and then when the model gives you one for free the reference gives you one for free it's like yes sir unwrap haha now I think we're on track okay now in this case you can see we have horrible stretching so this is our wonderful subsurf modifier trying to help us out but just like you know when you had that that face that was here along the slat right and it was like stretching that weird in fact it's doing the exact same thing here so you just select something like that that whole edge and then you just give it a seam so actually it's going to approve you can see what's happening shift E and it's now made it basically sharp essentially it's it's it's tightened up the graphics those of you who got that reference that terrible university advert there's two guys are like oh man mom said I would never be anything playing games and then look at me now mom and then the lady comes in if you guys finished that work yet I just I just need to tighten up that university like really destroyed their reputation from that that was um I think to even to people not familiar with 3d they were like yeah that's bad that's a scam school anyways unwrapped let's see how that looks now I put a big Haws seam at the back there because I don't think we could remove the stretching that was there previously but guys check it out we're coming up on 20 minutes so you know what that means homework that's what that means we've met it's time to do the rest but thankfully these I mean for one I mean come on you didn't really expect me to UV unwrap that one coming you knew that one was gonna be home work this one okay give it give it a give it a good old thought on how you could actually UV unwrap this again it's it's I mean for one definitely we ran out of time but also it's gonna really by giving yourself a challenge rather than following a tutorial it's really where the real learning happens so do attempt it but in the next part I'll show you the method to actually do it but give it a shot yourself and see how you actually went and then go ahead and click on your screen and we will finish off the UV unwrapping and get to the lovely texturing and dust start making this this model start to look real and it'll be a lot of fun so I will see you there

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 468,141

Keywords: blender, tutorial, uv unwrapping, texturing, blender uv unwrapping, texture, 3d software

Id: XeBUfMKKZDo

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020