Maya UV Mapping for Beginners: Straighten UV Tool

have you been struggling to get optimized and compact UV layouts and Maya has the unfold tool left you with a bunch of curved or warped UV shells that are taking way too much space and your 0 to 1 what if I told you there's one tool that can dramatically help those you V's get perfectly straight and take your UV layouts and Maya to a whole new level today we are talking about Maya's strain UV tool what's going on you 3d modeling beasts this is damn you see and thank you so much for joining me today we are talking about the strain UV shell tool now before I start the video I did and I got a little confession I did throw the strain UV tool under the bus a little bit partly because I didn't know how to use it properly um it's still not a one-size-fits-all solution meaning that there are a lot of cases where the strain UV tool no matter how much you finagle it is just not gonna work and you will still need just to unfold you these but with certain types of shells it could definitely make a big difference so let's go ahead and jump in here and this is pretty much just a straight-up unfolded mesh if I go here and I shift right click and I hit unfold you see that it doesn't change right so out the box the strain UV tool will not work on certain shelves right so trust me I've tried it on pretty much every shell and I got to work on half of this UV layout so let's go ahead and begin all right so I'm gonna come here and I'm just gonna shrink this guy down here and I'll enable my checkerboard pattern and to do so there's this little window here right here so we're gonna enable our checkerboard pattern and then it looks like I have used default material and this is what we got so this is not bad you really don't see a lot of distortion here so as far as this torsion the unfold tool it's gonna do what it's supposed to do unfold probably won't get if you have enough cut lines you probably won't get a lot of distortion would the unfold tool but where it lacks is that obviously as far as a UV shell optimization you know you're gonna get a lot of these you know crooked UV shells that are gonna take up a lot of room versus if they were straight one little asterisks here is that it's not gonna work every shell it typically tends to work better on you know things like this where it strips so if I go here you see that this is a nice strip but kind of this main body here I wouldn't even run it because it's just not gonna work so you got to kind of pick and choose your battles with the strain uv2 all right the first thing that I want to do is just see what the tool gives me right so this is actually pretty straight so I'm gonna go ahead and right click go to UV double click this guy here and what we can do is there's two ways to access the tool one it's via here under tools and if we go this show UV toolkit we'll see it under unfold right so under unfold we can go ahead and do strain you v's and there we go so this gave us a pretty good easy result right but trust me it's not gonna be always as easy okay so if we look and we enable our checkerboard again now we see that this is pretty straight right so if we're like in a texturing package or the substance Photoshop right if we draw a straight line it's gonna go ahead and just basically wrap this without having to go and actually do it within the viewport all right so let's look at maybe these smaller strips here so I'm gonna go ahead and double click this guy here and these belong to the top here so what I can do is run the tool again and you see what happens this time so now there's a second way of accessing the tool versus the toolkit you can do shift and right click and then you can go to strain and then we can do straight movies and there we go this is what happens right so this happens a lot this is kind of will discourage me from using the tool in the first place because I will just randomly select these UV shells do a shift and right click strain strain TVs and you kind of get these weird results and then probably what I'm assuming happens to a lot of people so the trick to getting the strain you've each L to to work in some instances is the actually spoon feed it as much as humanly possible and strain the UV shells before you actually run the tool itself so I'm gonna go ahead and select my UVs here right I'm gonna enable the rotate tool I'm gonna hit deed and edit the pivot move it right about here where the curvature starts go back to the rotate tool and then just start straightening it out right so I'm gonna strain this guy out I'm gonna deselect these guys here I'm gonna hit D again move it right about here I'm gonna go ahead and enable the rotate tool again and then I'll go ahead and rotate and then I'll go ahead and move it as well right so now I'm gonna go ahead and get these guys here activate the rotate tool again indeed to move the pivot move the pivot here enable the tool again and then now we can rotate this right so it's not perfect but this is gonna work so we're straight here now we got to do this bottom part so same thing as before we'll select these guys here we'll hold down D hit here to rotate rotate this guy over move it and then we can go ahead and move it here so now this is a lot better than it was before obviously this is gonna have a lot of stretching here right it you know you 3d viewport and now we're gonna go ahead and run the tool and get a perfectly straight shell so I'm gonna double click this to get the shell selected shift the right click strain strain UV tool and there it is so sometimes it could be a bit rebellious so like right here you see kind of refused so what we can do is just kind of move this guy over like this double-click this and then we'll run the tool again and there we go so now if we look at the shell and we see it in 3d space so you could definitely see how this actually lends itself better to texture right now we see that we have this shell here right this is the one that's perfectly straight and this is the one that's still curly alright so let's go ahead and do another shell here towards the bottom you see that this is pretty much just a strip here so now we can go to the V's double click and then try the tool again strain you these and we get kind of wonky result right so what we could do here is let's move it off to the side and do a little bit more work to it before we run the tool now here I'm gonna show you slightly different method so here I'll go and select this edge shift right click I'll go ahead and go to cut and now that these guys are cut what we can do is double click this shell here and then we can go ahead and select about this edge here in the middle shift right click we can do straighten shell so that's going to strain it we'll double click this guy here as well shift right click strain shell and now we'll go ahead and select both of these guys shift right click and strain you these and it did a better job right so now what we could do from here is select this edge here and then shift right click low mode minimum move and so right helps if I could actually speak well I'm doing tutorials but so now I can go ahead and double click it again shift right click and then we can do strain and then straight movies and there we go and if we take a look at the actual shell which is this guy here you see that it's a lot better off so what I'm gonna do here is if we take this guy that's already straight and we're just going to go ahead and duplicate it and then with this guy here we'll just run that unfold right so we take this guy that was straight and we go ahead and run fold you'll see that this guy's going to be a lot harder to place right and it's going to take more space in your UV layout right and you're gonna have more issues versus something like this where you could just take this guy here and just place it really close and it's just gonna fit a lot better optimize your UV spacing and also make your texturing a lot easier thank you so much for tuning in folks I really appreciate your time and hopefully you can go ahead and incorporate the strain UV tool within Maya to improve your UV layouts and also your texture so please remember to comment on this video like and subscribe for more videos like this if you haven't done so already that's all the time that I have for you folks I will catch you next time

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 41,413

Rating: 4.8883958 out of 5

Keywords: maya uvs, unfold, maya 2018 uv mapping, uv map, texture mapping, unwrapping, unwrap, uv, uvs, uv mapping, autodesk maya, maya uv, maya uv mapping, maya uv mapping tutorial, maya uv unwrap, maya uv editor, maya uv layout, maya uv sets, maya uv mapping photoshop, maya uv tools, maya 2018, maya 2019, maya 2017, unitize uv maya 2018, maya unitize uvs, maya unitize, texel density, headus uv layout maya plugin, game development, 3d game development, 3d game design

Id: sknXcSoDe-M

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/REVATOR]

Keep it up JL! It‘s always great to start the day with a glimpse at the maya subreddit and seeing another one of your videos! I wish I had all of these when I started to learn maya, but they do have something for intermediated as well in my opinion :)

[u/xXPyroTimeXx]

Saved for later, thank you!

[u/midiology]

Thank you so much for doing this!

[u/Chuppyzocker]

And the little outstanding bits of the UV shells arent a problem? also sometimes it seems like on some of my edges are other edges, is this a problem?