Maya 2018 Beginner: UV Mapping (1/3)

hey guys it's Monica at academic Phoenix plus and today I wanted to go over Maya basics UV mapping this is an introduction to how to use the tools provided by myates you can use these two UV map just about everything so again this is more for beginners and let's go ahead and get started so this is a scene right now we have a plane a cube a cylinder and a sphere now you can download the scene at academic Venus plus calm or you can always just create it yourself because I just used the basic polygon models over here at the top but in case you don't want to go through all the effort here you go I'm all about making it easy for you guys so you can learn as much as you can so again if you want to download this you can find this at academic Phoenix plus comm and you can download it for free okay so let's talk a little bit about the theory of UV mapping so let's say that you have a 3d model looks like this and you want to texture it in a unique way so what you do is very similar to a paper doll you spread it out like so in Photoshop and then you will draw on it once you have the shape and details that you want on the texture then you reapply it to the 3d model so that would be something like this if you wanted to do more complicated models let's say these cute little cats right here you would have the printout so you were lay it out like this as you can see it's not a perfect square but because of its complicated shape you're gonna have interesting looking movies a little bit more organic and you draw out your details that you want and then you go back to your 3d model and you apply it so let's take a look at some examples of UV maps here's an example of a character that has been laid out as you can see you have numbers you have colors and the grid is layout enough square a character is very complicated so you can see that there's a lot of pieces to that character here's one where it's just a head so the head can have its own UV space here's the chest area it seems and this is probably the tongue the nice thing about this is that you just go ahead and texture it and there whoa this is fancy so nice little gift that I got but basically just lays it out and then you put detectors on top of it using that information you'll be able to actually put texture on it the character will look like this very similar to a paper doll well let's go ahead and take a look at Maya and all of its tools that it has so as we know about UV mapping is that we are gonna take an object that is 3d and somehow lay it flat so we can export the UVs into a image manipulation software such as Photoshop so up at the top over here we have this thing called a UV editor so let's go to UV UV editor and right off the bat you can see that we have a UV editor window plus our UV toolkit now I could leave this open but up here to top right Maya already provides us a very fancy workspace called UV editing so let's go ahead and choose that this makes it very convenient because all my UV UV tool kits are right here my UV editor is right here and then I've got my items here as well okay as you notice when I select my objects each of them already have some sort of UV map that's because it is a polygon now just to show you there are other surfaces that you can use such as NURBS so here's some NURBS sphere and you'll see that it really doesn't have any UV maps not like this and the reason why is because this is not really polygons this is actually curved so if I right click on this you have isoparms Paul and a bunch of other things versus here you have all right click on it I have edges verdicts and faces so it's just a little bit different so moving on so right off the bat you can see that we have a plane and this plane has a UV map notice that it goes from the 0 to 1 and 0 to 1 this is the X this is the Y the 0 to 1 space is where you want to lay out all of your UVs at the end but notice that if I scroll out you're gonna notice that there's this huge UV space so you have all this space but eventually you are gonna collapse it all the way to this space 0 to 1 all right so let me show you a little bit about this window up here so the UV editor this is the eye feet if you just hover you see that it's on wireframe if you click on this one it's gonna show you what's called shaded and shaded means that if there's any it will show you if there's any overlap or if they're reversed so what does that mean well let me show you let's say I'm gonna right click grab my UVs I'm gonna grab these it's like vertices basis and I just gonna overlap them notice that it turns purple well well this is purple kind of like it makes between purple and red that just means that the UVs are not only overlapped but they're also reversed so if I move this up you'll see that the UVs are actually reversed here so that means that anything red you want to be able to flip or somehow make sure that it turn blue blue means that this is correct red means that the UVs are facing the wrong way this type of color means that it's over overlapping I'm gonna undo that so very similar to vertices I could right-click and you can select vertices if you want to so that's cool thing about UVs is that you're not limited to just selecting vertices you could UVs you can also select vertices and faces so this little guy right here is showing you that anything white means that there is no stretching and no collapsing so when we do a little bit more complicated items it's going to demonstrate to unit again if I hover I'll tell you that it's going to show you any type of distortion that means that if there's any type of if it's stretching too much it's gonna start turning red or if it's compressed it's gonna start turning blue so this is a way to visually see can't if something needs has some sort of distortion this is our border this is really important because we get to see the border of not only our UV shells but also on the model so for example if we take a look at this one you can see where the edges are see that T this is where the it is moving on if I had a texture I can turn it on and off here and this one is very handy this is our grid we used to have to find a texture and assigned a grid and now we don't have to it actually comes with it now this is important because it tells us that the UVs are facing the right way and if there's any type of distortions so if the texture is a square and the UVs on the model is a square as well that means that the texture is not gonna stretch however let's say model is like this you see all that stretching that means that if I put a texture on here it's going to stretch and it actually won't look good so I would have to we map this to make sure that it is nice and straight so I will demonstrate that right now the first thing we need to look at is up here at the top under UV I'm gonna demonstrate to you three UV mapping tools once called cylinder once called planar and once called spherical as you can imagine these are shapes so if we have a plane here which one do you think it's going to be right it's probably gonna be planar so let's just go to default the object is plane the projection is plane and therefore everything looks good now notice the difference between before and after before the you race were really crushed and then now with planar mapping it's now looking really good I can move this left and right by the way so what does that mean it means that means that if I put a sign of texture to it it's not going to stretch it's going to look good if I flip it over you're also gonna notice that there's the vehicle like this notice that there the UVs are backwards so you got to keep that in mind when you use a plane because that means that if you put text on this plane so for example let's say that this is a wall it's got graffiti on it that graffiti is gonna be backwards on the other side if you want to turn this off you can think and now you can see the UVs so this is a pretty simple one now let's pretend though that my object is actually rotated like this so I'm gonna go to my attributes change the negative 90 let's say it's like this and I'm going to you know change the geometry just a little bit maybe squish it a little bit more like so maybe make it really long something like that I'm gonna activate the map and you're gonna notice that my UVs are stretched so that means that I have two UV map so I'm gonna go ahead and go to UV planar map and a whole bunch of things happened one suddenly our grid is gone and now it's stretched right this is not good because the square is supposed to show up and instead we have these really stretched rectangles that's that means that everything is questioned to this one pixel over here to the right if I turn this off you're gonna notice that there's this line so what that tells me is that my UV map isn't really working when it comes to planar so what can I do well you really just need to go is to you V's planner and then go to the options under options you're gonna notice a couple of things by the way I probably should have shown this earlier this is the default you need to make sure that you turn on keep image width height ratio otherwise it's gonna project it into a square I don't know why it's like this I don't know who I the default isn't this but you have to turn it on and just make sure you keep it on so what we were doing was actually using a Y now if we want to do an X and I you can see that this is a Y going up and down X is going left and right we can choose X make sure this is on and then apply and now we're getting that exactly what we need which is a grid that looks exactly like our texture and if I want to move this up you notice that the text is perfect so that's exactly what I need okay cool let's see what else I want to show you about planar mapping and of course if your UVs are like this let's go ahead and change this to 90 degrees and I try to keep the default and apply you're gonna get the same issue right so that means that the planes facing this direction which is over here a Z it's a leg Z apply and now the UVs are good so now what happens if it's crooked let's say it's something like crazy like this what do we do if I choose z doesn't really look that good notice how much it's it's warping the B's it's not gonna look good I can try why why it's all wonky good luck and texturing that none of these are really working so what can I do well there's a fancy one called camera and camera means that I have to look at the model the way I wanted to use you map it so something like this and then I click apply whoops let me go to object mode apply and now I have a projection based on the camera that I'm looking at for so if I need to fix things I can apply and maybe I can get a better angle like this so you're in object mode apply and then there you go you now have a UV map based on the camera this is really convenient if you're our faces are facing in an interesting or different way alright that was the first part of this tutorial for basics in UV mapping then next part we're gonna talk about more UV mapping tools and how you can use them on other objects thank you for watching I really appreciate your support and taking a time the next episode we're going to talk more about UV mapping if you feel like this is helpful and you'd like to see more please like share and subscribe you can also download this file at academic Phoenix plus com thank you very much for watching and I will see you next time

Channel: Academic Phoenix Plus

Views: 137,331

Rating: 4.9368725 out of 5

Keywords: maya 2018 basics, maya 2018 beginner, maya 2018 uv mapping, maya 2018 beginner uv, maya 2018 mapping, autodesk maya, plannar mapping, planar mapping, theory of uv, uv mapping, projection mapping, uv projection mapping, maya 2018 texture, beginner uv, video tutorial, animation, 3d artist

Id: YjwtQRsFe1g

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018