Cinema4D S22 : UV Unwrapping Part 1

in this tutorial we are going to look at uv editing and kind of go into what uvs are and we're going to look at one other modeling technique that we haven't discussed that will that allows you to do cutouts and things from geometry a little bit easier than um than some other things and it's really and so and so we'll take a look at that and so the first thing we're going to do is i've got this simple camera start scene that i created and this camera is as i said simple right there's very few parts to it i wanted to create some geometry that was you know somewhat complex because what we're going to be doing is we're going to have to unwrap all of this to um create something that we can apply textures to in a way that is reliable and makes sense and doesn't smear or warp the textures that we put on it and this is really crucial for when we start working with body paint and when we start trying to apply anything other than just uh you know if we take our normal material and just plop it on there um you know that may be okay um but a lot of things can change so to start with what we're gonna do is we're going to take this side panel that has nothing on it we're going to add a little feature to this and so the way we're going to do that is we're going to do something we're going to use the the knife tool in a way that we haven't previously used it before so one of the things you can do with a knife tool is you can create a spline and then you can use that spline to cut to be the cut shape for the knife tool and so it's sort of like a stencil and so you could you know bring something in from illustrator like a logo or something you know cut it and then extrude that from the surface of an object there's a lot of different ways a lot of different things you can do with it we're going to keep it simple and just use a circle and part of this is because um i'm trying to show you the techniques to unwrap uvs without having something so complex that it's going to take forever to like effectively unwrap it in a way that doesn't make you want to lose your mind because you're just learning how to do this so what we're going to do first is i'm going to zoom out just a little bit and i'm going to go ahead and go to my splines i'm going to create a circle and this circle is too big and it's at the wrong orientation so i'm going to change the plane from x y to x e y and i'm going to change the radius from 200 centimeters to 20 centimeters now once i do that it disappears and that's because it's inside this model and so the way that it works to use a spline to cut so what we're going to be doing is cutting a circle in the side of this on the side of this object and the way that this works is that the spline needs to be just above the surface that you want to cut and then you need to orient the camera in a way so that you get that cut right where you want it to be and on the surface right if i was to um you know rotate my view like this i might have a really strange cut in the side of the surface or if this you know oval was offset or something like that that could be problematic and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to switch my view to the right side and you know make sure you make sure that your view is on the right instead of the left just double check that and if it's different just go to your cameras and switch from left to right and so i'm going to pop this open and now i can place this wherever i want it you know i'm going to set it kind of down near the bottom of the geometry and then what i need to do is i need to make sure i'm in polygons mode i need to use my live selection tool i need to select the object that i want to cut so the body and i want to make sure that i have in my live selection tools i have only select visible elements turned on so i'm only selecting this polygon and then i just want to click once to select that now once i've selected that polygon the next step is to use the knife tool and so i could either go into layouts and change to model and then select the knife tool from down below or i could hit the letter k on the keyboard once and hit the letter k a second time to use the line cut tool and then if i'm on the mac i hold down command and hover over the path that i want to cut if you're in windows i believe you use control to do the same thing and you'll know you're on top of it when all those dots show up now those dots are all the points that are going to be created when this is cut and currently i want to keep this simple i don't want that many points so i'm going to go back to my circle and the circle the intermediaries points are set to uniform and it's set to eight i'm going to reduce that to four and yeah it's not going to be you know i'm going to have c edges in my geometry but i just want this to be a little bit simpler to do so we're going to do that i'm going to hold down command again i'm going to oh i'm going to select the body hold down command while i'm over this line i'm just going to click and when i do that now i've got two polygons and so if i pop this open or and switch my view you can see the spline is the dark line and then inside that i now have two polygons so i'm going to go ahead and delete the circle because i don't need it any longer and again you could create a text object and cut text into the surface there's all sorts of things you can do with this it's pretty amazing and then what i need to do is i need to make sure i'm in polygons mode use my live selection tool select the body and i'm going to deselect everything and then just select the circle and what i'm going to do is i'm going to extrude this in to the surface a little bit so i'm going to hit the letter d on the keyboard i'm just going to press this in a little bit and then what i want to do is i actually want to make rather than just have this be a straight cut i want to create a couple bevels now with this when you create bevels you have to be really careful especially if you know you're going to be taking this object and uv editing it because what can happen sometimes is when you bevel and i'm sure we've all seen this already you can unintentionally make your polygons go crazy and stretch beyond the bounds of where they are and oftentimes even if you don't see that you have overlappingpoly.com and when that happens and you go to uv edit something you go to do a step called unwrapping or relaxing it's going to give you this degenerate polygons error which basically means you have points or polygons that are laid right on top of one another and you need to go and clean those up now it'll show you where those problems are it highlights the polygons that are at issue but it's it's really annoying to try and clean up and fix and so in this case rather than bevel this in polygons mode i'm going to go to edges mode and i'm going to use the loop selection tool so we're going to be using selection tools a lot in this tutorial um because you have to do a lot of selection and so i'm going to be using the keyboard commands to do that the other option to grab all the selection tools i mean when we're in model mode they're down here but we're going to be switching the uv edit mode eventually and when we do that they're not going to be available so the easiest way to get to them is we can go to the select menu up here and there's this little dash double line here if i click on that what it does is it pops out a little free floating menu of all the items and so now i can just i can either come in here and click loop selection or what's even faster because i have to switch between tools so frequently if i hit the letter u on the keyboard that brings up the selection items and then i know the letter l is loop selection but you can see if by the way as soon as you move your mouse anywhere that's going to disappear so you just hit u again to see it so i'm going to hit u and l and i want to loop select the inside ring and i'm going to hold down shift and loop select this outside ring and then i want to bevel that and so right the modeling tools i hit the letter m first and i could go down and click on the bevel button there but it's also the letter s on here so i hit m and then i hit s now i've got the bevel tool and i can just hover over here and click and drag and again right if i bevel too much you can see what happens right i'm getting all sorts of weird behavior on the surface of this mesh we don't want that to happen right i'm just going to bevel a little bit so right so instead of having this like hard edge on both sides i've just rounded the edge of this object a little bit in both places okay so now that i've done that there's something else we need there's one other thing we need to talk about and that is you'll notice that i have this object set as the body the lens body the round button and the square button and if i hide the square button you'll see that there's a hole there right so i actually created a spline a rounded rectangle um and or maybe i did a rectangle and i beveled the corners i can't remember but i did a rounded rectangle and there's a hole missing there right and there's this button here actually i do remember what i did i actually did a bool to put those two things together and you'll you know you'll notice right i have my lens body right is separate from the body of the camera but they're lined up perfectly if i hide the lens body the same thing's true there's going to be right a hole there and i'm actually intentionally leaving this polygon that's floating here in place because if we make this lens transparent you see the inside of the camera which we don't really want to do we want to be able to have a material here that we can make it dark and not so uh reflective or not not to be not so visible so how and why did i do that so first the why or the how the how is that i took these things and i in this case i actually extruded this from the surface of this object and then was able to extract it in the case of the button i actually created a cube intersected it with this top surface and through a bool and then was able to separate it that way and so why did i separate them i separated them because what we can do is we can apply a different material to each one of these objects and and then it very easily isolates this and as we go through to do uv editing and everything else we can then when we we're going to bake all of these objects together and so we'll actually combine all this geometry into one again but it makes it makes the whole process a lot easier and it's just a lot easier to manage when you do things like this so i'm going to show you how to take an object you're modeling and split the geometry from it so let's go ahead and we'll just add another boxy blob somewhere on the surface maybe it'll be we'll pretend it's like the flash cube or something that's like right here so we're going to go ahead and create a cube it's going to be way too big so let's go to our model mode or our yep our yeah our model mode and then let's use our move tool and to start with i'm just going to scale this thing down into some sort of usable size for that feature we want and i'm just going to move it here it's way too deep right now so i'm going to pull that in and then pull this out right i don't need um a whole lot of thickness on this thing because i'm going to be just cutting it right through the surface and then let's go ahead and make it a little shorter move it up a little bit over a little bit right and we'll say this is going to be our flash you know i i'm not going to worry about you know what that actually looks like too much and then i might bevel the corners a hair so i'm going to go ahead and do the cube i'm going to check mark fillet and great i'm just going to leave it with the default fillet settings it has three subdivisions the radius is three centimeters right this is clearly not to scale but for our purposes that doesn't really matter and so then to um to unite this with the body geometry i'm going to go ahead and go up and create a rule i am going to pull the body in as one object and pull the cube in as the second object and right now it's set to the bool is set to a subtract b right which means i get this um hit in there which actually you know might be the way i'd actually want to model this with and then i could have another object in there and some reflective surfaces but i'm not going to worry about that i just want the extrusion and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to change my bool from a subtract b to a union b and i want this to be high quality and i want to hide new edges if i uncheck that i get all sorts of nightmarish edges instead of this singular polygon with a with a hole cut in it which is what we want we don't need um all of these weird triangles on the surface of this object all right so i'm going to say hide new engines um you know we could do a fong break at intersections what that does is it basically means wherever these intersect there's going to be a hard corner it's not actually if if it's within the phong angle right it does some rounding and so it won't round it no matter what we do but in our case it doesn't matter so we're going to unite this and so then what we're going to do is we're going to select these we're going to right click on this and we're just going to go to make editable as soon as i make that editable what it does is it creates the body and the cube right which i'm going to call the flash okay so if i turn the flash off now there's a hole right these two objects are separate from one another which is pretty fantastic right so i'm going to pull these out of the bool so they can just be part of the normal hierarchy again and delete that dual object because we don't need it anymore so i've got the body i've got the flash we've got the lens etc etc so what else um so the other way that you can separate geometry if you've say extruded it from the surface of another object so let's say i actually want to um take this surface and press it in to the object a little bit and then be able to essentially cut that chunk out of the option so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to polygons mode i'm going to use my live selection tool i am going to go to the flash i'm going to select just this front polygon face i'm going to hit the letter d and i'm going to click and drag to pull this geometry back into the body of the camera maybe maybe it only needs to go in just a hair right like this is say the bezel that goes around the the flash itself so so i've created this geometry and now let's say like i know that i want this to be like say shiny black material but this needs to be something else it needs to have luminance or there needs to be some other material applied to this so that it looks more like plastic or glass and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use my loop selection tool and i'm just going to come down here until i can select that loop i'm going to hold down shift and select that so i have that internal polygon and these polygons selected and then in order to extract this chunk of geometry from from the greater object of the flash what i do is i go up to mesh and i go down to cut no where is it sorry i go down to clone and i go down to split and when i click split it creates this flash dot one object and if i turn that visibility off what it does is it has split that geometry away so there's two options i guess i chose split but if i hit e and i move this i'm just going to pull this out you'll see that it's still in there right because the base object when i split it i'm essentially just creating a copy of this geometry in a new object right so what i should have selected and should have said is let's see here this is okay i have no idea let's get flash.1 out of here let's use our flash okay so what i need to do is i actually need to go to mesh and hit the one below it i need to go to clone and disconnect and what that does is it disconnects them and says okay right it's disconnected this geometry from the previous geometry and now that it's disconnected i can go ahead and split this so i can now just say mesh clone split and so now i have flash.1 and i may still have that internal geometry but if i go to flash um and actually what i'm going to do is i'm going to put this back i go to flash hit delete oops so i'm going to go to flash.1 i'm going to delete those polygons that are there and for whatever reason it just renamed it a weird name but look so there's right so now there's that hole there right so this is a separate object so i can just sit call this is flash this is flashlight inside i'm not sure why it chose to do it the way it did but all right so that's another way you can separate that geometry right um okay so i've made those changes and so let's go ahead and talk a bit about uvs what they are and projections and all sorts of fun stuff okay so one of the things i want you to note is i've intentionally deleted all of the little checkerboard tag which is called a uvw tag from the things that i created however whenever you create new geometry it automatically especially if you make it editable it automatically creates a uvw tag for that object which means it's created uvs for those for those objects and uvs are essentially a set of vertices and polygons that determine how the 2d image that we use the 2d texture that we use to put the color and all the material stuff on the object is wrapped around that object and that can cause you know all sorts of interesting problems so in this case there's these uvw tags on these other objects there's not right and whenever we create like if i was to just create a cube right um any primitive we create has no uvw tag on it right the way it understands how to apply the material is based on the material tag so keep this cube here that create a cube and let's change our layout to standard and i have this material that's called red here and you'll notice it's got this grid in it and we'll talk about that grid here in a second but i'd like you to apply it to the cube right so we're going to apply it to the cube and when i apply it to the cube if i click on the material tag that's been created you'll see that there's these different types this projection right and there's uvw mapping there's spherical which you can see that when applied to a cube does a really bizarre thing right this would be kind of perfect to apply to say a sphere but not so hot for a cube you and you can see how these lines are distorted right this is a cube this grid should be square but go ahead and just look through some of these other options right cylindrical again not quite the best option flat you can see that this top surface looks pink and that's because that's what that top edge is the flat projection right is really only projecting on one side and through the object to the other side and then all the faces are pink on the other sides because the pixel that happens to be at the boundary of this object is pink right so if i go down to cubic then i get something that looks like the uvw mapping one did where basically every all six sides all six faces of the cube have the same um same thing applied to them and the way that this looks when we uv when you look at the uvs is that these six sides are essentially folded on top of each other and so that projection is going through all six sides at once you can imagine it is they're all transparencies that are placed on top of one image right if i had like bob ross's head as a material his head would be on each of the six faces as well um if i do frontal what that does is it projects from the view of the camera straight down onto the object right this can be useful for certain things um uh and spatial um is similar but again a little bizarre um and then there's uvw mapping which in this case because we have no uvw tag is just the default cubic mapping there's shrink wrapping which is somewhat like a sphere but a little bit different and then there's camera mapping and camera mapping i honestly have never used for anything so so i'm going to go back to uvw mapping for this and now let's go ahead and but if i go and i apply this to let's go ahead and apply this material to right something else right so i've applied it to the camera body and i'm just going to go ahead and get rid of this cube and delete it and you'll see that this is not what i want right if i was to try and apply text to this or like you know the name of the camera or some other surface details on here they're going to be all sorts of warped and smeared and it's going to be a nightmare so so what's going on if i click on the tag here the projection by default is spherical right and that's because there's no uvw tag for this object right so how do we create a uvw tag that becomes the first question that we need to answer so what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and we'll delete this material to start with and let's select and actually let's go ahead and delete these two other uvw tags as well and then i'm going to go ahead and just select everything in my hierarchy i'm going to go to the tags menu and i'm going to go to material tags and set uvw from projection now the other thing is there's some polygons that are selected here i'm going to deselect every polygon by clicking off in space with my live selection tool in the mirror okay so now i'm going to go to tags i am going to go to material tags set uvw from projection if i click on the um if i click on this right by default the projection type is flat um frontal also works but we can just go ahead and do flat for this it doesn't really matter what we start with we're going to be making changes to the projection so i'm going to hit ok and then with all of these objects selected i'm going to go ahead and see if i can apply the material to all of them if i do not get all of them then i'm going to go ahead and continue and flat is not going to work for us i already know that so what we may do is we may go ahead and change our projection oh and for some reason the flash inset did not get a flash.1 did not get it tagged so let's go ahead and set this from projection and we're going to go ahead and we could either do frontal or we could just do cubic probably let's go ahead and apply this material to everything else button and here and uh again these are all set to uvw mapping but our projections on these tags we're incorrect so i'm going to select all those tags i'm going to delete all of that i don't know what just happened but i'm going to select all of these material tags cubic should be right i don't know there we go now notice that you can have multiple uvw tags um so you can have multiple sets of uvs ideally you don't want that because it gets really confusing so i'm just going to delete the previous one and have this one so now what i'd like to show you is what some of the issues are with just applying materials like this without doing any uv editing and then we will stop take a break and come back to do the rest of this so here's one of the issues right this is the this is all the same geometry and you'll see that this is being projected right you can imagine these being projected cubicle right so there's one face that's projecting in on the front side a face projecting on the left side etc etc so one thing you'll notice is that they are not uniform right these are stretched a little bit they're not they should be square and these are squished a bunch right they're much taller than they are wide um something else that happens if we zoom in a little bit is you'll see on this object we're getting something similar where as this goes around this bend because this is being projected straight down right the this edge here everything gets compressed and smushed right and this is the same thing this is that side projection but things either get stretched around the corners or they get compressed around those corners and when you have um you know if i if you look here right this one's actually reasonably okay except where these edges are you can see that they get kind of sandwiched down in there and they don't look right and if you were trying to to paint this or apply materials to this you'd actually have these weird seams everywhere which isn't going to be very helpful either um and then the same thing goes on basically every surface on this right you'll notice as well and this is pretty clean but right you can see that the number two here is being smeared across the surface right things are not looking the way that they should look and so um you know it's reasonably even across here but again they're not uniform and when you have that lack of uniformity then in some places on your material your if you make your image so it looks proportionally correct on the front surface anything you apply to the top is going to be totally distorted and that's what we want to avoid now we're looking at this as a hard surface object right a camera we're also going to look at kind of how we'll do another tutorial on how to unwrap a soft object but this teaches us a lot about the process um and so we're going to start with this so we've set everything up we're ready to start pulling this apart so we'll do that in the next section

Channel: Austin Stewart

Views: 370

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Id: huraJ_w2vJ8

Length: 29min 7sec (1747 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020