Easy UV Unwrapping in Blender!

what's up guys welcome to today's video and in this one i'm going to show you the easiest and most straightforward way to unwrap your mesh ideally your low poly mesh for game assets so as you can see here pretty decent unwrap not perfect um no unwrap is going to be perfect but pretty damn flawless like here on the front it's a little bit iffy but um these are all things we can manage as we go so let's go ahead and get started so let's start this one from scratch i'll remove the uv map here and as you can see when i go to the uv editor we have absolutely no uvs in here so i'll go ahead and clear the seams and show you exactly how i would approach something like this so make sure first of all your mesh is completely joined together meaning all your modifiers are applied and the mesh is just one single object there are a few different strategies sometimes it's easier to unwrap separate objects and then join everything together and pack the islands into one i won't be discussing that in this video i'll just be assuming you have this as one single mesh because that's like the most straightforward way to demonstrate uvs but if you have separate objects it's completely fine to unwrap those manually and then join everything together after the fact and then pack the islands if you want to go that route it doesn't really matter so right now i have this hard surface object it has some curves in it to give it a little bit more of an organic feel but nothing super crazy so the easiest and most straightforward way to unwrap even when you have n-gons on the flat surfaces like this is to simply select a based off of the sharp edges and there's one single button you have to press to do that and all we have to do is go up here to select let's go into edge mode select and then we're going to go to select sharp edges and now we have this selection here so essentially this is going to pick up most of the edges we need to mark a seam on now sometimes the angle the sharpness angle doesn't quite pick up so usually what you'll have to do is pick up some of the slack like what you could do is adjust the sharpness angle and it'll kind of tweak things but 30 degrees is usually a good middle ground but there might be some areas like right here that did not get picked up so we'll have to go in and select that let's see what else it might have missed i don't think it missed much else if um if it did we can you know go upon that round once it comes but once you've done that and you've pretty much selected all the necessary sharp edges here the easiest way to get a nice seam is to press ctrl e and then mark the seam and now we have a seam in probably the most clean location we need them in so the easiest way to get a clean unwrap is to make sure all your seams are on the hard edges in your object which we've done here that is why we did this selection button for the sharper edges on the hard surface mesh so let's go ahead and unwrap this we're going to do is pull out the uv editor and we're just going to select everything and press u and then unwrap reason we're not going with the smart uv project option is because generally it's a lot worse actually in this case it wasn't too bad but i'm still going to go with the manual unwrap okay so we have this island right here what we need to do at this point is preview the actual grid on top of this thing now if you don't have a grid this little checkered grid really easy all you have to do is press the new key change the size to 4k which is what i use then we'll go here and go to the uv grid and i'll just name this i don't know preview and click ok and then all we have to do is apply this in the node editor so let's go here to our shader editor we're going to go to the object tab make sure you have a material applied here and basically all you do is you add in an image texture and then you click the drop down select that checker connect it to base color and then if we go into material view we can preview our uvs so this result right off the bat is pretty clean as you can see pretty much all the way around is um is an okay unwrap there are issues especially with the more cylindrical pieces because cylinders are usually going to have a visible seam somewhere in there so if we kind of go here to the bottom it's kind of warped on this one this is a massive issue this is not good and the reason for that is because of this pipe right here see how it's not unwrapped properly we want it to unwrap according to that curvature so the easiest way to manage objects like this is to simply apply a seam in an area where you're not going to really see it in this case we'll you know probably see the front pretty well but maybe here in the back we won't really see the seam so we'll go in here and then on this one we'll go in here and alt shift click and then control e to mark the seam let's go ahead and unwrap it again now that looks a lot better so same exact idea for the cylinder right here we're going to need to alt shift click and control e mark seam and unwrap it again now we have a much cleaner unwrap on that one the reason we have to apply seams manually on a cylinder is because by default the curvature the edges of the curvature making up the cylinder are not sharp edges so they're not going to get picked up when we do this selection up here so unfortunately we have to do our selections manually so not a big deal we'll just go up here to this one as well alt shift click control e mark seam and unwrap that one much cleaner same for the handle up here this one is a bit warped so we'll go and select a seam in the back that we can't really see so let's get these two ctrl e and mark seam you know the drill that one's a lot cleaner now this one is a bit warped this little connecting thing i don't know you want to call it but let's see maybe we'll go down here and just do one seam it's not the cleanest seam but i think it'll get the job done okay yeah that'll work this one's not physically connected so this one's probably just going to be a bit like skewed right there we could come in here and take this face and just move it up manually to kind of match it a bit better if you really really wanted to get specific with it just kind of match that but you're probably not going to really notice that anyway so i'm not going to worry too much now this here in the front there's a bit too much stretching here this is going to cause quite a few problems with textures and it's just not going to look good so there's not going to be a really easy way to hide the seams in this one so what i'm going to try is just to simply do something like this and see if the seam is decent decent enough to not be like crazy from a distance but i don't really like that let's try putting the seam maybe right here instead ctrl e and mark seam now it's going to be worse isn't it yeah i think this is going to be our best bet right here ctrl e mark seam and unwrap that there's a few other spots you could try you could perhaps try something like this just control clicking around and doing something like that it's just um it's going to be the same type of thing no matter where you go so right here is probably the best bet we'll unwrap that and if you really wanted to you could try to like manually move these things around but it's not awful so i'm going to go ahead and leave it alone we'll do the same thing on this side let's go ahead and unwrap that i just noticed we missed this one we could just symmetrize symmetrizing will get the same effect but um it doesn't really matter if you come in here and symmetrize i mean it's not gonna you know change too much but you will have to dissolve out the new edge in the middle which is fine dissolve that one out and dissolve this area out unwrap one more time there we go all right so this thing is looking pretty good we're on a good track to finishing this unwrap now i don't think there's anything else missing is there perhaps the cylinder the cylinder is a bit too warped around this part right here so we're going to do is drop a seam right there on the bottom let's deselect this portion get rid of that control e and mark seam and unwrap that one a little bit better we don't need a seam right here because that's just going to give us problems let's go ahead and clear that seam unwrap again it's not too bad it's a bit too like a rotated i'm going to try to make the unwrap a bit more static so we'll go ahead and put a seam right there it's a bit cleaner yeah it's not too bad there is going to be a seam on the bottom and on the top but i don't think we'll actually see it unless we really walk up to it and take a look so not a big deal so it's almost done there are a few more things you need to consider i'll show you those so the first one is right here uh we have two seams on this chamfer no need for that so we'll go ahead and deselect these two all the way along the edge ctrl e and clear the seam and unwrap that one to make it a bit cleaner also right here i'm not too much of a fan of the fall off there's no like real connections so i'm gonna go ahead and deselect this portion we'll just control click down all the way to the bottom same for this area control e and clear the seam and unwrap that one that's a bit better and yeah this isn't awful this is probably a good unwrap for what we need in texturing and things like that so i wouldn't worry about it if there's like any slight warped or something like right here um not a big deal so this is a good unwrap good textile density good everything so at this point we're going to go ahead and just um do one quick overview and then take this into substance painter so just make sure you didn't miss anything big no bad warps or distortions anything like that is going to be a big no-no for our unwrapping but this did a pretty good job i don't see anything super problematic here let's select these and remark those not sure why those got deselected like that okay yeah this is a good unwrap this is something that's going to work very well in substance painter and if there are any visible seams that really bother you you can generally easily mask those out by using some sort of painting techniques and substance we're going to go ahead and get this thing ready for export and importing into substance so once you're done all you have to do is simply select the object make sure a material is added but that probably has already been done because otherwise you wouldn't be able to preview the uvs so now we're going to do is go to file and then export it as an fbx file so file export fbx we're going to export this and click on selected objects and we'll just rename this to i'll just do uv example and we're done at this point all you have to do is bring it into substance painter so i'm going to go ahead and open this as a 4k document resolution we'll go ahead and select the the asset click ok this is one i made previously but it has the same unwrapped so no big deal and there you go so now if you go in you can bake your textures you can make whatever you need and if we were to add on a material maybe we'll do something with a bit more detail actually let me bake out my maps first and then we'll do that so i'm going to go in here and select my high poly version which is right here we'll do 4k for the output change a few of these things turn off position and thickness and let's match this by name and do like four times anti-aliasing and bake that out and now if we add a material to this you uh you should be able to see pretty clearly that our um let's do this one our textures are pretty high detail the resolution's nice let's do a different one we'll do like this one instead or perhaps this guy right here and as you can see the texture is super high resolution textile density is nice enough to make it not look like blotchy or blurry and that is how you get a nice uv unwrap and bring it into a software like substance for texturing so thanks much for watching guys hope you enjoyed it hope you learned a lot about uv unwrapping and can apply this to your own project so if you enjoyed the video definitely check out our patreon account we have all sorts of custom tutorials and cool stuff over there that i really think you'll enjoy but other than that appreciate you watching hope it helped out in some way and i'll see in the next video [Music]

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 91,108

Rating: 4.907053 out of 5

Keywords: easy uv unwrapping in blender, blender uv unwrapping, blender uv unwrapping tutorial, uv unwrapping, uv unwrapping tutorial, uv unwrapping blender, game asset uv unwrapping, blender game asset tutorial, blender game asset, blender hard surface modeling, hard surface modeling blender, blender tutorial, josh gambrell, josh gambrell game assets, blender bros

Id: IQeOEEI8FWE

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021