Maya 2022 mulit-component prop UV tutorial

all right welcome to another video where we're going to be taking a look at the process of unwrapping a multi-component mesh i have here a dumpster model provided by a student that we are going to be using as the demo piece to create these uvs this model has been created using five separate meshes we can see them here and they are all properly named and i'm just gonna make sure that i select them all together this is an object that would get a single texture across its entirety and so we're gonna unwrap all five of these components in one go with everything selected i'm gonna go into my face or polygon mode and i'm gonna reduce or remove everything that is a duplicate so there are two handles on this thing and i'm gonna select the left one and delete it they're two led lids i will select and delete two brackets and i'm just deleting the ones on the left here because that makes it a little bit easier to remember where to go and place them in the end i'm also removing the rear wheel whoa make sure we just get the wheel i'm also removing the rear wheel um as i will be able to clone it back as well so we now have a single instance of each unique mesh this means that we're going to need to do uvs only once on all of these components and once we're done we can copy them back to where they were and they will inherit the uvs of the originals with that done i'm going to open our uv editor and i can now see what the uvs look like on this object by default now this is not something that was done incorrectly uvs get garbled and messed up just through the process of 3d modeling an object and so typically you're going to see something like this now there are also seams in our model again created through the process of modeling this object that we don't want to have these are denoted as white edges in the editor here and so we want to kind of reset this back to something a little bit more normalized so what i'm going to do is select all of the polygons and i'm selecting them in 3d space not 2d space this is because something might be out and over somewhere that we can't see so by selecting in 3d space i can be assured that i have everything selected with the entirety of my mesh selected i'm going to do a planar projection this is going to reset any of the seams to be gone so anything that was originally broken through the process of modeling has now been welded together and the only seams that we get are seams that exist in 3d space as well as 2d space so anywhere where there's an open edge on the model next we're going to go and start identifying what we need to unwrap so i'm going to move this away from the zero to one and we can just double click to select islands so the first island is the main body of the dumpster itself all of these polygons here are contiguous they only touch one another they're not welded to anything else we have the lid we have the handle we have the bracket holding the lid to the dumpster and we have the axle upon which the lid rotates we have our wheel assembly here which is actually comprised of a box which holds the assembly to the dumpster a cylinder allowing it to rotate a fork which allows the wheel to rotate and then finally the wheel itself and so there aren't a lot of pieces here that actually need unwrapping when we break it down like this i'm going to go and start with the largest piece and we'll kind of go from there so one of the things that i want to do this is a completely symmetrical piece so instead of my uv toolkit i'm going to go and find the symmetry node and i'm going to turn it on to object x this is going to allow me when i select an edge as you can see here the opposing edge selects in blue this means that my selections are going to go faster so i'm going to first start by selecting the edge underneath the lip this is a great place to put a seam because the only place that we can see that seam is if our camera is positioned under the dumpster looking up at it not something we would typically get in a game so that's a great place to hide a scene i'm going to go to cut and sew and cut the shortcut for this is shift x and i'm going to switch over to that shortcut now in order to speed up this workflow next i'm going to go and select all of the diagonal edges in this box this is going to allow this thing to splay open a little bit better and then we can go and do the front here as well now they didn't the double click doesn't select all of these front edges separating the front from the side because there are a lot of zigzags in that separation so i'm going to go and select these manually again i still have that symmetry turned on which means if i go and do this break here it is doing the left side and the right side at the same time with that done i'm going to do a unfold of this object just to see how we're doing looks like we got two islands they're both in the shape of crosses here i'm going to go and straighten them out by selecting a blue edge and using the arrange and layout orient to edge it'll straighten out the islands associated with those edges so this is not too bad but i know that crosses don't uh typically pack all that well so i'm gonna go and select the edges that make up the sides or that separate the sides from these things and break those and i can now go and place these over on the left and call them done let's move on to the lid for the lid i'm going to first grab the bottom face and do a cube or box map this is going to separate that from the rest of the object it's going to get a projection downwards because that polygon faces the bottom i'll unfold it which is going to skew it a little bit and then i'll straighten it using the same technique of grabbing an edge and selecting orient to edges the bottom of this is now done we can move it over here next i'll grab the remaining part of the lid and unfold it just to see what we get and this isn't too bad but i think we can help further it along a little bit by splitting the edges that make up the downward facing sides here so if i go and select those like that and break them this is going to allow me to a little further unfold this now we're going to get some stretching in this object this is natural just because of how compressed these bevels are but that is something i'm willing to accept in this model to avoid actually having more uv vertices created by adding more breaks so with that done i'll go and add that to my finished pile and move on the next largest piece i have here is the handle the handle is made up of a four-sided cylinder essentially with some fins along the top and bottom so let's deal with the fins first i'm going to select all of them and we'll do a planar projection which is going to put them in the zero to one box i will unfold them this is going to align them a little bit better to the the shape that they have in 3d i'm going to grab one of the blue edges on each one and i will use the orient to edge to straighten them out now this is not perfect but i'm going to align them this way here and try and do a straighten uvs to better take advantage of the fact that pixels are square so this is going to give me a little bit less distortion in this it's not going to be perfect because again we have a 45 degree angle but i'll consider those done and we can return to the remainder of the handle the next thing that i want to do is split off the front and back of this thing so to do that i'm going to select the entirety of this thing and then just remove everything that isn't a front and back using the box projection the front and back will be placed here in the zero to one now something looks off at this point i can see that these are not symmetrical uvs and if i hit unfold they also don't change shape that means that they're actually asymmetrical in the 3d model this is a modeling error that was created and i'm not going to go and correct this we're going to leave it as is i'm going to consider these two done and move them to the side this is going to create some skewing in some of the other meshes that we're going to get here so let's go and select the inside edge and break that this is going to separate the inner from the outer and let's deal with the outer first i'm going to unfold it and grab an edge and align it and that piece actually looks pretty good let's do the same thing with the inner we're going to unfold grab one of the edges and orient it and this two looks to be skewed this is because again of that skewing that was done inadvertently while modeling this is not ideal for a uv island there are diagonal edges and you can actually see stepping in the uvs here as well we don't want to have that happen so i'm going to use these straighten uvs this is adding distortion to my uvs but the distortion then won't exist in the textures which is going to make it look a little bit better with those pieces done and moved aside we can move on to some of the little small pieces here let's start with the bracket that holds the axle on for this i'm going to select just the polygons that make up the left and right side of this thing i'm going to use a box map which will go and unwrap them in the way that they should be we're going to use an unfold to make sure they don't distort and we can move them aside we can then go into the border faces here now in the border faces they're actually non they're planar they're looking directly at the camera in that planar projection and this means that if i were to unfold them the software is going to have a hard time figuring out what shape they are and you can see they compress down into a little point to help my along i'm going to select one of the uv vertices here i can just move it inwards a little bit this means that there is now a surface area that we can see in our uv editor that is enough for the software to be able to grab this object and rotate it and align it the way that we want so this is now well unwrapped and we can go and move this into our completed pile let's grab the box that holds the wheel together and the wheel we've got the axle here as well we'll have to come back to these i'm going to leave the cylindrical bits for a moment so these two are pretty easy in the box i'm just going to select the vertical edges and break them and on the cylinder i'm going to grab one vertical edge and break it and if we unfold these and straighten them we're also going to get completed uvs on those two components i'll move them into our finished pile and return back to the unfinished pile the axle i'm going to switch to my selection tool and i'm going to select the center vertex this is going to grab only the two caps and i will box map them to get them lined up over here again i'm going to line up two of the edges so that this thing is nice and straight and those are done we can move them to the finished pile and then we can return back to the remainder of the axle i'm going to select a singular edge and break it and we can now unfold this into a nice big long rectangle now there's an issue with this rectangle if i go and straighten this out you'll see that because of the flanged shape at the end we're getting a distortion in the polygons in the end if i were to try using the straighten uvs button which would straighten this out you can see that that distortion is not going away to help the software out i'm going to select just the top polygons and we're going to go and scale them now i'm going to turn off my symmetry at this point but i'm just going to scale these in a little bit until they're closer to the width of the rectangle here now if i select this entire island and i straighten that should be enough for the software to be able to completely straighten this out and now the axle is done we can replace it with the rest of the the unfolded pieces that leaves us with two pieces here we'll leave the wheel and we'll start with the fork so on the fork if we go take a look at this in 3d this is just a rectangle that has been wrapped around the wheel so i'm going to go and select the inner edge that runs all the way around this object remembering to select the joint at the bottom where it is not connected and i will break that this separates the inner from the outer and if i were to unfold this object we now get the inner and the outer completely separate which we can align and again we can separate these so that we can see that they are nice and clean and we'll go and place those in our finish pile lastly we have the wheel now i'm going to do the wheel in a very interesting way here i'm going to break some of the uvs in order to get me some of the uvs done and then we're going to unbreak what was broken let me show you what i mean i'm going to begin by putting a box map on this what this is going to do is it's going to give me the caps on the axle and the sides of the wheel unwrapped properly this does however break everything else however once i've got those pieces separated i can put a planar projection back on here and get these pieces to work the way that i want them to i'm going to go break the outer edge of the wheel just by selecting one that appears in the ground and i'll also go and grab a corner edge for each of the internal loops i will break those as well now these pieces shouldn't wrap i'm just going to go and select them which is a little difficult here because they are planar which means again if i were to unfold them we're going to get little points and not the things that we want so as before i'm going to select the uv vertices grab a random edge from each of these shapes and just move it until what we have is a little bit of face area then i can unfold and straighten grabbing internal edges and aligning and those components are now done what remains is the axle now this was not done symmetrically in the way that it was modeled and so it's going to provide us with an opportunity to test another object here so let's go and unfold this this is going to give us two donut shapes and we're going to go and break one of the edges on each one i will then go and unfold these and you'll see that we get these kind of rainbow shapes now these rainbow shapes i'm just using rotate here to better position them the first one if i hit straighten will become a perfect rectangle which is beautiful it's done however this piece here if i try to straighten it you're going to see is going to give us this wonky shape there's a really neat trick that we can do to use the software to straighten this out for us if i hit straighten uvs followed by the optimize button twice straighten optimize twice straighten optimize twice straighten optimize twice straighten eventually this object will unfold itself in the way that it should and just like that our pile of pieces that need unwrapping is done if we go look at the end result we can see that every checkerboard square in this texture is completely square this means that we've got and done a pretty good job again we're going to end up with a little bit of distortion in the lid where we expected it but that is pretty minor in terms of size and so i'm willing to accept that there is however a larger problem of textile density here if we look at the wheel we can see exactly that that grid changes shape and size rather as it moves throughout different components and this is not good the software will correct this for us as we pack our uvs into the zero to one box to begin with let's go to modify and layout options now i'm going to reset my tool to remove any of the previously saved settings and i will go and enter those settings so that you can see what they are to begin with i'm going to make sure i'm using unfold 3d i'm going to also go into my packing resolution and set that to 2048 and while i'm at it i'm going to go to the texture map size and also set it to 2048. my hacking iterations i will increase to 10. this is how many times the software will go through the algorithm in order to try and pack these into the zero to one box the higher this number goes the longer the algorithm takes to process however the better the end result i found that 10 is pretty manageable the next area i want to edit is the shell pre-transformation i don't want to let our tiles go and rotate if the software were to rotate them and make them skewed i'm not going to get the best pack so i'm going to make sure that pre-rotation is turned off in terms of pre-scaling i am going to want this to happen this is what's going to correct that texel density here the setting is preserved 3d ratios and that means that anything large in 3d will remain large in 2d anything small in 3d will become small in 2d this will correct our textile density next shell transformation settings i'm going to allow translate shells and also allow rotate shells now this is different from the pre-rotation in that this one we can limit its rotation to 90 degrees this means that while these objects can rotate they can only rotate a full 90 degrees this is going to give us a much better pack next our shell padding this is in the layout settings we've already set our texture map size to 2048 and that's in pixels i'm going to go into the shell padding and i'm going to set this to 4. shell padding is the separation between uv islands or shells 4 here means that we are going to get 4 pixels in a 2048 by 2048 texture between these two islands i'm also going to set the tile padding to 2. 2 is the distance between your outermost shell and the edge of your texture a distance of two means that we're going to get a shell two pixels and then the edge and then in the opposing tile another two pixels which gives us our four again and then the next island so let's make sure that we end up with four across the board that's it with that done i can select all of my polygons and hit layout uvs this will begin the process of packing these objects in the zero to one box now the little percentage meter at the bottom of the screen is going which means i know that it's doing what it's supposed to be doing and i'm just going to be patient and let it finish its job and in the end we should end up seeing something that looks a little bit like this this is not too bad it's done a pretty decent job in packing this there's still a little bit too much wasted space for my liking now that wasted space is the result of the fact that this is as big as it can get these pieces and they just don't properly fill up a complete square however i do have a few other pieces that we can place in here those are the pieces that we deleted now that we've completed our uvs and we can go and check that our texel density is now uniform we can see that it is absolutely gorgeous in here that we've actually got only one size of square in all of this texture what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go and recreate the pieces that we did deleted i'll begin with the handle and i'll use the mirror button i'll grab the wheel assembly and i'll use the mirror button that's going to create the mirror on the other side i'm also going to hit move and holding shift on this to the back of the dumpster again that gives us our rear wheels i'm going to want to combine those so that they are a singular mesh again i'm going to mirror the axle and lid and i'm going to remember the little bracket as well with that all of the geometry from the dumpster is back now this won't have manipulated the uvs in fact anything that was cloned the uvs just ended up directly on top of their counterparts i'm going to take this opportunity to again select everything and run the layout process again and what we should get here is a much denser pack because there are a larger number of smaller components and they tend to fill in these gaps really well so when this finishes here after it's run its 10th time through the algorithm we will see the end result of what this pack looks like which looks a little something like this so there's still a little bit of wasted space here which again is something we just can't get past but that is going to be it for this dumpster i'm going to close the uv editor go back to object mode we need a little bit of cleanup here now we have some manipulations that have been done to this object so i'm going to delete its history i've got a group here that was created from the fact that there was a clone i'm going to delete that and we have all of our objects we also have our wheels here now named wheel 2 and i'm going to rename that back to wheel and now this object is good to go we're all nice and clean i can just go to file save as and save my file that's it newbies are done on this thanks for watching we'll see you next time

Channel: Christopher Turner

Views: 402

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Id: 874I88SM4ro

Length: 23min 21sec (1401 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021