#CGTip | How Do I UV Map a Head?

hello and welcome to another CG tip all we're gonna do in this video is we're going to explore some of Maya's UV editing tools as we simply apply UVs to this head model so as you can see it's just quite a low resolution model but it should serve to help demonstrate the process so all I'm gonna do first is I'm just going to go to windows modeling editor UV editor just open this up let's just move the head over here so we can actually see it so if I select it now we do have some basic UVs on here but they're absolutely unusable we are not going to be able to create a workable texture on this as we can see over here because the UVs are being projected from the top down we're getting lots of stretching here and underneath here the UVs will be flipped from the top here so you'll end up with lots of texture stretching so let's just get the head unfolded initially so all I'm going to do is I'm just going to create a basic plane our projection together start it so I'm just going to go to UV planar open the options oops let's just move that back out and the toolkit as well did it mean to do it doc that right so looking at the scene the z-axis is pointing directly at the face so that's the axis who you want to project down so I'm just going to set this to Zed click project and there we go so we've got the UVs now instead of going from the top of the head down they're going from the front of the face to the back but we're still going to get the same problem as you can see here we've got stretching around the sides and the UVs at the front of the head are the same at that as the back so if we had applied a texture now we'd end up with the texture for the cheeks and the lips coming through to the back of the head as well because our texture is just this flat square here so what we need to do now is create a seam and when we've created this scene that will allow us to essentially unfold the head so it's like you're creating a cut around your own head and then peeling off the skin and then flattening out that skin so you can then paint it and then reattach it back to your head and refold it background it's quite a gruesome way to explain it really when I'm thinking about we but you get the general idea where like it's just like we're unfolding the skin so that we can flatten it out and paint on it so I'm just going to select an edge and I'm going to select one at the top of the head now when it comes to UV seems the best places to put them are in places where they are not going to be as visible now we wouldn't put a seam down the front of the face because with any character the face is a focal point so you don't want seams on the face because there will be noticeable so putting them in places where they are hidden or not as noticeable is always the best idea so it could be that this character is going to have hair added on top and hair going down the back of his head so if we had a seam here it wouldn't be an issue cuz it's going to be covered by the hair now these days you can get around texture seems quite easily you know if you're projecting your textures from a high-resolution model down to a low resolution one then that gets around the issues of having texture seams but with that in mind it's still always good to keep them in places where they're not as noticeable so we've selected our edges down the back I'm just going to turn off that grid for now just so you can see those a little bit clearer and this button up here that just turns on the grid and turns it off if it's not visible in the viewport just go to image and click display we can also turn off dim and that will give it the full brightness but obviously then you can struggle to see your wireframe so I'll just go to dim so here we can see sort of the default Maya texture being applied to the head and it just helps to show how the UVs are currently laid out so let's just turn that texture back off and all I'm going to do is I'm going to hold down shift click with my right mouse button and go to cut now you saw that get thicker that selection there and it's also a thicker in here if I go to object mode we can see now we can see the seam down the back of the head so now we have a scene what we can do is we can try and unfold that so it's like we're getting our fingers into that seam and pulling pulling our skin around to the front of the head so again I'm going to hold down shift and I'm going to come over to the unfold tab over here and while holding shift if I click on unfold it's going to open the options now by default it is set to unfold 3d so if I click apply you can see that gives us quite a nice initial layout to start working with now it's rotated slightly so we need to fix that as well so I'm just going to rotate it's background here and we want this line to be as straight as possible so that looks roughly about right and I'm gonna move this into the middle of this initial grid here and let's scale it down as well so it fits on the actual texture page so that's roughly about right so we still have a bit of an angle and you might not be bothered about this but for me I like my UVs to be a bit more precise and exact especially if it comes to painting your textures manually in something like Photoshop if you're working on one side and you just want to flip the texture across and mirror it over to the other side it helps if your UVs are perfectly aligned so I'm just gonna fix this I'm just gonna select the UVs down the middle make sure we don't select any on either side as well and then I'm gonna come down to a line and snap now if I select this button here this first one that's going to shift all the UVs over to the left so it will take whichever UV I have selected on the left the furthest one on the left and shift all the others across so if I click that you should see it move across like so so they're now all perfectly aligned I'm just gonna zoom in and I'm just gonna move it over to that grid point so it's perfectly down the middle so I'm just going to hold shift now select all those movies and what that has done is that has inverted the selection so we no longer have the central UVs selected so now I could do another unfold and that's just straightened out those other you v's around either side now we do have some slight issues with movies here and with the eyes and the mouth as well now we could leave the u-visa like this but I like to do a little bit more I'm just going to turn the texture back on so it's looking okay up to now but if we look down here we can see this which is the representation of this zero here it's quite stretched so we can start to play around an experiment with a u-visa a little bit more to be fair it's not taken as long just to get this initial layout so we do have time to spare to go in and tweak them to get a better layout why sometimes like to do is I like to unfold 3d is good but sometimes I like to play around with the legacy tools as well using horizontal and vertical just to see if I can get better layout if I select vertical if we then select those u-visa and click apply you can see the phase looks a bit squashed in now if I bring back the texture the face looks squashed in but this looks a lot nicer down here bring back that so we could try horizontal as well click apply so that's looking better so we could use something like that but the problem is just turn off the texture again if we look the eyes are now overlapping and so is the inside of the mouth so let's just undo those and go back to our unfold 3d projection so what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to select an edge around each of the open areas so around each eye and I'm just going to go to fill hull I'm going to select an edge around the other eye and I'm gonna press G which will repeat the last command and it will fill that hole as well then I'm gonna go down to the mouth press G again and that's gonna fill that hole as well so now if we go to unfold again and we try the legacy tools so we'll try vertical and then horizontal I do them one at a time if I just undo those if I just selected non clicked apply as you can see we just end up with these absolutely unusable you v's so that's why I like to try vertical and horizontal separately just to see how they look but by filling in those holes we've now got Betty you've ease around these eyes the mouth looks a little bit weird but I'm not concerned about that because we can fix that later on so just close that let's have a look at how they are looking so down here looks better and what we're looking for is these squares to be square not stretched not deformed and also these numbers to be not deformed either so I'm going to turn off the image in here that's just so we can see it more visible in here so now we filled those holes let's compare with unfold 3d and just see which gives us the better result so I'm not going to select those central vertices at Central UVs again so remember we're looking at how the texture looks in this side so let's try it unfold 3d and see how that looks now obviously we left the central movies alone so that's why we've got that stretch there but we're still getting these stretches under here so to be honest I'm tempted to go with Mayer's legacy tools in this particular instance now it may not be the case for you if you are working on a head or something else I would experiment with birth and just see which gives you the better results let's just select all those for now let's try unfold with everything selected and we see that still looks quite good but we've still got the stretching under here so maybe we could say let's just select this area underneath the head where the stretching is and then let's try unfold but the legacy tools this time and slight vertical click apply so that's even that out a bit but maybe we didn't select it high enough so let's just select another rule up here unfold again click apply so there that's working a bit better so yeah we could maybe go with that so that's a mixture of the both we've used unfold to give us the main movies and now we're using the legacy tools just to tweak certain areas yeah we're getting some stretching around here but unfortunately we're the ears are you are gonna get some sort of some squashing and deforming so let's say that we're happy with these initial UVs now we have an issue around the mouth like I said earlier but we're gonna fix that now but first of all that's just isolate at least let's get rid of those areas that we filled in because we don't need that geometry anymore so I'm just gonna do a bit of cleanup now now the first thing I like to do when I'm doing any UV x' is obviously on the UV page here the eyes are open but there are times when your characters are going to be blinking or they're going to need to close their eyes and with this current UV layout as soon as they close their eyes you're gonna see stretching on the texture on the eyelids all the normal maps not going to look right it's just not going to look right because there's no texture there to display really all the textures just going to be stretched so what I like to do is I just like to go in close the eyes you know essentially this is wasted space on your texture page there's nothing going on in here so I'm just gonna move these up I'm just gonna close the eyes so it's always good to look at the model and see where these u-visa guitar being used so I've closed the eye there so let's select that loop and that loop and that loop so now I'm just going to go to tools smooth and we get this little yellow box down here so let's just try clicking and holding on relax and then scrub to the side so there we go that's nicely softened in those you've ease we could maybe go a little bit more you know we could maybe just pull these in a little bit just to give it a bit more texture space for the eyelid and then maybe select these two outer loops here go to tools smooth and then relax again as you can see as I scrub it it's relaxing and unrelaxed in so that's quite good so now we've got an eyelid that's closable so let's go down and we can do the same with the mouth there's no point in having this empty wasted texture space here we may as all come in just tweak these just to close the mouth a little bit so just something like that and again we just select EUV double click and hold shift or more next to it and it will slightly edgeloop let's select a few around the mouth and then go to tools smooth and we'll use the relaxed tool again and that's just soften those in so we do have the opposite side to work on as well now the good thing is is we can because we want this to be symmetrical because if we're editing this in Photoshop or something and we're using photo reference we can work on one side and then mirror it across and obviously we fixed the eyelid here and the mouth so we want the UVs on the opposite side to be per se well luckily we can just use the symmetry tools so I'm just going to select the side that I want to keep I'm also going to make sure that the centre of the UV shelf is in the middle of the actual page like so this just makes it quicker and then I'm gonna hold shift right mouse button go down to symmetrize and that's done it automatically but normally if you go down to symmetrize let's open the options so we mirror across to you applying closed so that's worked automatically and as you can see the opposite side is fine normally what happens is it comes up and it will tell you to select a edge which will be the central point for you to mirror across so there we have the head UVs unfolded on our unwrapped and ready to be textured now I've shown you a few different techniques in this video and I do suggest that you experiment with a few different ones don't just use unfold 3d because the legacy tools do still have a place in your workflow so no matter what I'm working on I always experiment with both maybe use a mixture of both to get the result I need and like I said don't forget to go in close the eyes close the mouth and then you can use symmetrize to just easily and quickly mirror the u-visa cross so I hope you've enjoyed this video if you have please let me know in the comments below also let me know if you have any questions and tell me what future videos you would like to see and why not say thanks with a small donation buy my coffee page as always remember to like this tutorial and subscribe to my channel to keep up to date with future videos this isn't CGI signing off and I will see you on the next one [Music] you you

Channel: antCGi

Views: 14,590

Keywords: rigging, maya, autodesk, maya3d, rigging in maya, rig, 2019, maya 2019, gamedev, game art, game development, game rig, how to, how do I, uv mapping, uv, uv toolkit, uv editor, unwrap, unfold3d, legacy tools, smooth, symmetrize, mirror uv, seam, cut, weld, eyelids, mouth, eyes, uvs

Id: SiyjfDj3-_U

Length: 20min 43sec (1243 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019