Introduction to UV Mapping - Learn the Complete Basics

hey guys had any Morton from flip normals here in this video we are gonna be showing you some of the basics of UV mapping so we are using Maya in this video but these principles here are true for whatever software using it whether it's blender cinema 4d or 3d stereo max we're going to be covering two main concepts here the first one is straight up projections we're going to talk about planar projection cylindrical projections and then at the end of the video we're going to talk about unfolding as well so if these terms don't mean anything to you that's perfect they've this video is for you yeah I want a recent one do this video is because I was struggling with these concepts here actually until embarrassingly late when working with UV sand textures the way I would texture beforehand was kind of like do an automatic map find a grunge texture map and just kind of throw it on here and that's alright if you want to take your model to like 30 percent and you can almost kind of hack your way around it but if you want specificity if you want to have perfect control over your textures you just need to understand these concepts here they're very simple once you understand them you just have to have to understand them yeah I sort of avoided doing you bees for the first three years so yeah lady career so that's embarrassing yeah it's um I think you mean for me was this mystical concept within 3d that was far beyond my comprehension and the times like I can never learn how do you be and then I figure out that it's actually super simple yeah and also the tools today are super simple as well as they're really good when we started out the tools word is terrible really bad today the tools and pretty much all majors 3d software are really solid bunch of people are still mocking Maya for being terrible diva mapping if you actually use the last versions you'll realize that it's very mature now yeah from 2018 I think 2017 yeah a few verses back I think they just drastically improved them they they brought up nightshade so if anyone knows nightshade UV that's what they integrated that's now the tools in my so the my is sort of doing the 3d studio max approach they're just they're finding super high quality plug-ins and integrating them yeah I mean whatever works yeah so let's just get started with this this here is not gonna say it's the best model of our mate I mean really close so this here is if you can tell this er is a cat of coke you know if a kiss there was any any doubt here yeah so what we doing here is we have a label which looks like this which is just something I just hacked together super quick in Photoshop here and the exercise here now is this label here should now be on the main part and this here should be the bottom and this should be the top super nice texturing super non-human mapping then we're guys we got you yeah so the first thing we're gonna do now is we're just gonna apply this here as as a texture map so you just you just assign a shader to it we all read on that there's shift right mouse button a new favorite material and just Lambert and then we go to the color output we click file so this is just a file note we'll just connects it we can also just disable filtering that's just a habit I have there's no repurpose this is a muscle memory you won't probably one doodle rendering and then we just go here and we just assign the coke label to it so now you can see that of useful list doesn't work here so let's see what's going on here so if you go to UV UV editor here nope we we can see here that we have we have a planar map assigned to this this is just something I just I just put on just to kill all the Emmys so this place this polygon here now has is mapped here which is what we're seeing here so if we were to move this here around here you can see that this now changes here so what we really want now we want this area here to be mapped on the label part here I went to top part little map there and the bottom part in map there so the way we can do this we can select just middle just drag on the middle here and I want to do UV and cylindrical map which we found here so now we can see that we have a cylindrical map for this and this is very simple you just hit the are key to get a scale tool and I'm going to move it down here and there we go now this here now has been mapped into place if we just select the UVs here this right mouse button V's select them and just drag them up you can under see what happens here if it all the way down here this region here all these polygons are mapped the region down here if we move it all the way up here is no map to this region so take it further and you can see what's happening here what what I really want to get across in this video is it's really just the correlation between the UV editor or the V's here and 3d here because this actually took me a long time to understand that these has to over this has to be in the same place so now we're done the body here so now we have a wonderful can of coke obviously this modelling here is it's like cartoony and is way too simple but for production this is still the same we are do it obviously your model right properly and then I would just use a cylindrical map for this no unfolding required or anything for this and then we'll take the top part here and the way I prefer to do this is I just prefer to select one vertice ctrl or right mouse button two faces and empty faces this just gives you a selection of the top part here and now we can go to UV and planar and let's see what happens now if it does it this is just gonna assign a general planar map to it now it's from the side which is wrong so what you want to do you want to go to planar and the option here and it's at best plane I was gonna just see what's the best plate for this would be so a planar map just explain real quick a planar map just looks from one direction and sort of like unfolds whatever you YZ or whatever faces you've selected in that direction so now there was a camera looking up from the top yeah and going okay map it from the top here and that's why you see now in the UV view you have this perfect top cylinder it's like represented planar map is what is what I'm using most of time just to get something into the UV editor here regardless of what it is if it's a creature or a kind of poke I'll still just assign this to a planar map and just chuck it in here because now the reason you don't need to have to unfold anything here it's just because it's just a true representation what's happening so you cannot just scale this down and just move it into place so you can just see now it's just kind of in place here and just spend some bit more time on it just to make sure it's and it will do same for the bottom as well we sort of multiple ways of selecting all this kind of stuff I'll just show a few tips and tricks here if you want to select the bottom here you can just select select this entire thing I select a top and bottom and then you can just shift right mouse button also shift drag which selects inverse which is pretty handy hmm in here as well you can also go shift right mouse button mapping and you can planar mapping here as well which is pretty much the same thing as doing it up here just a bit quicker yeah it just stores the last option you selected so because we did the projection with the best plane it's just gonna do that again yeah I actually very rarely actually use any of these menus here I use it to get up the editor that's about it to be honest so then just get it down here and like so I would say you visas something that you shouldn't be afraid of no it's uh I wish someone had told me that when I first started doing 3d because I I tried to look around unless oh I don't know 12 years ago and using site like tutorial eyes and stuff to try and find some stuff but no one really explained why you did the things you did and no in terms of you v's so I was I kind of skipped a step because I was I went straight into unfolding cuz I was doing characters and stuff and then you you figure out where your selector seemed sidious it unfold and it just kind of works but then I had I kind of had like a lower level problem which was okay I have a bottle here how do I get the logo on to this place here like if this here was a creature I could have a loo done able to unfold that and start painting in a mud box whatever was doing on time but it was for like all right so the coke logo should be exactly here shouldn't be there it should be exactly in this place here yeah how do you do that so that was it's all just basic easy stuff here so obviously Lister's the texture map just something I threw together super quickly in Photoshop but yeah this this here is really the way I would do it production here comes this we have another example as well which is so dice so let's assign texture up to this as well so not the coke one no so we can do the same thing apply this and just go through this and some file now to it and here we have a dice as well so I've done the same thing here it's well I just straight up just um just did a planar map on it and it's gonna look like this so when you do a planar map on on an entire object at at at the time that means that all all sides of where you have UVs they just get crammed into one space so that's why as you can see here now what's happening to the size of it looks kind of cool discomfort what you want yeah so if you look at it from behind you would see the exact same thing just in reverse back there out so there is nothing this is a good example is because there it this is how a die works yeah you just want weight essential woman do know is we're just gonna do one one player map per her face here just gonna do it in a simple manner I can now remember is its die single and dices plural we don't know that that's the important takeaway how does a dice or die for sure so let's just start here like straight up shift right mouse button mapping and play them up and now we have this guy here and then we can you can also just hit the arrow keys just to move it here or you can just move it around it doesn't really matter so that's one down and let's do this and same thing here you can see now it goes so fast losing marking menus it's just like dragging drop oh sorry not drag and drop it's shift around mouse button and straight up it's doing this up and then up the thing is you just you don't really have to take in two steps you can just go hope so let's just move this up as well like so so that's these two done same with this move it down here same with this I just moved here this guy and this guy and this guy so now we have all six sides to this so what do we do now now we're just gonna match them up so first I want to scale them all down so they're all uniform so their oldest fit and so I'm just gonna take one of these and just scale her up so it fits into into one of these guys because what always you have to scale them all and that's that's just annoying hmm so something like that cool so let's start to put him into place now so this one should be fine they should have number 4 and so this is kind of fun fact about photo die the Sun is always 7 so what's the other side here is 3 this is completely useless fact unless you're texturing a yes a diet or a dice yes I don't know what to say on the other side would be which of the three visible sides always equal seven is that no what I mean is like you have this side here yes that's I can't do math at all here so if this side here is five then this side here should be 200 so the opposing side yeah boys make seven yeah I see so four and three one six is it also like not intuitive for you that a like a box like this has six sides yeah it's weird I think it's four hear me too I go like this before but that's where I'm just being stupid so now we have perfectly good dice so again the reason is obviously the story is a simple example here and the model is stupidly simple and Allah but the the reason is really just that you understand that if you want to map this here to this place here you just do a simple planar map and you just put her in here if you don't understand this I would highly recommend properly doing a few of these tests because you should move on to characters or drones props or anything before you understand this I don't think there's there's nothing wrong with not really understanding the sort of basics and UV mapping it's like well it's trying to take an object in 3d space and figure out how does it look like not in 3d space you know so it's like you're translating it into another dimension yeah you're unwrapping it from - from 3d to 2d yeah which is which is surprisingly hard to do we had a teacher once they gave the example just imagine you're cutting up a person and you want to lay them flat out of it okay you wanna make a carpet you have a person so speaking of person on carpets no way so here we have coca-cola label man nice let's do the same thing here and let's unable a Lambert to this so now I've just done a straight-up planar project here so now we're gonna enable another kind of madness this is this is more like a utility map this is an actual checker the other ones you can see we just have a texture right away so the reason we we do textures for this is if you want to paint on this let's assume you only have Photoshop to go back to old-school stuff now and you want to paint a texture map on this here and like you could easily paint a map here now you can draw like a line around all of this here and and it would be fine but what if you want to paint something around the eyes here you can really do that you could paint something here but you wouldn't really have full control because you can see here it's crazy stretched here yeah so what you paint you're gonna here will just get stretched over so let's say you really want to paint some nice pores or like or whatever it is around the eye here you actually couldn't do that so this is where our unfolding comes into place so unfolding is where you you take a complicated shape and you're just cutting it up and straight up unfolding it it this is really where you have the whole leg cutting up the person turning turning a person into a carpet this is where this is like from Texas Chainsaw Massacre when he when he wore masks of the yeah faces of the people that's pretty true yeah yeah a supreme a cough way of putting it but I cut off the face and then you unwrap it and you put it on yeah essentially yeah but so go back and watch that it's it's actually pretty filmed the original from what the bike yeah so that is that is required reading or for the whole tutorial uh-huh so we're going to be reducing to two techniques so we're gonna combine the old technique here of planing projecting with unfolding here yeah so I'm straight up just gonna take the bottom part of the back part here actually select all of this here make sure it's all selected actually we can enable symmetry if you hold on W and just left mouse button symmetry and then symmetry because then we just get symmetrical selection here which is quite nice you can also hold on tab key just to select this kind of stuff so I just want to have the front and back as two separate islands here so let's do the same thing here now shift right mouse button mapping and flare map now you can see this is now one planar map here so this will not be as you can use as a selection sets as well and you can it just it is just a lot easier to separate this out like again if you if this head here was to become mask one is a Texas man then you would cut it up here this is what a seam would be or if you don't want to have that mock up things if it's a regular mask you would have seams on a regular yes you just have to it's like so one thing we should mention here you can see in the viewport and the UV editor is well we have these white lines running across the model mm-hmm that's what your seam is yeah so I mean that guy's very pretty self-explanatory it's imagine the same thing that happens in casting if you were casting toys right for plastic toys and like these molds you always see there's like this little seam line that runs across because you need to split up a 3d model somehow when you're casting it it's the same thing with UV maps you just have to so you can click on this guy here to see where the seams are which is I recommend having this on yeah otherwise you just in the world of pain and then we can do the same thing here I select this guy and this shift right mouse button and planar mapping and I see this like weird like kind of like ancestor home kind of thing from the Romans just had wax figures of somebody's head on on the wall so currently if you weren't if you wanted to painted this old-school style now if you were to just scale this that goes down here you could actually do it like you could actually make a texture map now for around the IC you could paint in this same way we did a coke can take this into Photoshop but it's still kind of terrible because you still see you have a lot of stretching around here it's actually go under the file node the place 2d texture node and we can now set the repeat here to some like five so now you can see better what's going on you can really see big size differences from the front of the face of the top there how stretched it is so if you were to paint a texture map right now you would have different scale of pores yeah and the fact that you couldn't really get to details here like there was nothing yet there's nothing to do here so if you were to paint right now you can you could do pretty well here or on the ice because there isn't really a lot of stretching there is some here but it's really this side here so what we have to do now now we have to unfold it so this is where you you select your your model here you can just you go to UV and just double click it and then you can go to shift right mouse button and unfold and then unfold and what's going to happen now now it's going to do this it's variable and unfold what do you have so we can do the same thing here and the crave name it's a bit easier to see yeah so just do the same thing shift right mouse button to the left unfold and unfold so now you would just took a 3d shape and turn into 2d so it's like imagine if you grab it from both sides with both hands and you're like you stretch it out like really fold it out properly this makes it a lot easier so now you can see that all the stretching is now gone yeah so normally you would also do like nice little cuts around certain places as well because you do get a bit of stretching I prefer to do some cuts around here so we can do something like this let's see this is where symmetry is super nice and the kind of cuts you need for face or body is just something you'll have to kind of experiment with this is this isn't so much about explaining the specific cuts for a face no exactly there's a whole science behind yeah this gets a bit complicated but you do something like this and then we can go to shift right mouse button again and cut and I can see that these here have been not been cut and now you can unfold it again here so shift back mouse button again and unfold and unfold and now you can see that it just opens up here it just makes the use slightly better yeah you can also see here that obviously this here is a bit simpler model like I deliberately cut away the ears inside the mouth all that because that's that's something I would keep us separate I separate you the islands in here as well just to keep it a lot easier so now it's time this too you can just rotate these by hand you versus a new feature which is pretty cool you can orient shell along edges we just Orient's it I'd also disable symmetry now because I don't really trust it that one yeah so select the middle one here and then orient along edges we just makes it more straight so now we can do oh yeah I also recommend doing a layout to pass a bit as well actually before doing this because the there might be differences in size between them now yeah so now we can select both of them and we can do layout and just default settings so this is gonna move them and it's gonna optimize the space a little bit and it's gonna by default it's gonna make sure they have the same the same size for them yeah so if like if you had your if the back of the head for example was scaled differently you see you get a different level of detail there yeah so pretty important yeah this is important because if you if you are like using a tile across something here you might maybe have like a skin port which is going across the entire thing here suddenly they would there would be a lot bigger here so we highly recommend that you keep them the same and then you can for layout here I'll probably just put this in double figures and just put it on the top here and I just put this in the bottom personal preference you can do this exactly how you want to yeah also because now with 3d painting being mostly done in in 3d software it doesn't really matter that seams are less of a concern nowadays just because it's like you're painting in 3d and 3ds painting software campaign of cross seams so it's not really an issue anymore but this layout here would work perfectly fine like whatever production is might you'll be doing here this it would work really well so you could export this straight to Mari severs painter whatever is and straight up start painting here so I just want to mention a quick thing as well I know this is a very beginner tutorial on movies here but one of the things as well which a lot of people don't really know is that UVs are used for a bunch of different things compared to just texturing texturing is the primary function of it that is so that you can get you can really control all the areas here but it's used a lot in production as well if you if you working with that words this is something I didn't really know until I started working professionally where it's used in rigging is used in effect it's a simulation and just a bunch of different things here yeah often you'll have what's called the UV sets within one model so you'll have difference here different kind of sets for different things you'll have your default map which is probably for texturing you'll have a rig set that never changes so you can always go back and forth there again XS for effects like the the effects one doesn't have to be overly complicated be super small it's just the effects team has something to map vertices to know so if we're further reading about this is what we also done a couple of videos for on flip normals on our YouTube channel which are they're about YouTube's younam's is super important younam's is essentially this system here it's like how to lay them out and get way more resolution on them I highly recommend that you check out the eudaimon we also have one which is UV mapping just a regular head as well which is which takes this and goes more advanced into it so yeah thank you so much for watching we really hope this has been useful if you have any questions when you've mapping or you want to see more specific stuff let us know in the comments below and yeah thank you so much for watching if you want to see more content like this in the future make sure to like comment and subscribe you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 95,006

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, twitch, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character, texturing, sanden, jaeger, substance, painter, designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, cinema4d, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, UV mapping, introduction to UV mapping, uv map tutorial

Id: dj0uXid9oGo

Length: 23min 47sec (1427 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 02 2018