Maya UV Mapping For Beginners

is UV mapping in Maya getting under your skin sex so density terrorizing you UV Distortion depressing you if you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about that's alright because I'm gonna explain it all in my Maya UV mapping tutorial for beginners in the video coming up what's going on you through the modeling beast this is Jam you see and welcome to my Maya UV mapping tutorial for beginners so unless you want to stick with the good old cool gray Lambert material for a while you'll probably need a good set of UV layouts when it comes down the texture I remember when I first started modeling I used to hate you these I didn't get them the tools that I used it made my u-visa look like crap so I actually became a better model cuz I would actually try to model all the details versus having some details actually textured in but at some point I hit the wall and I did have to learn how to lay IUDs and then get better at texturing so what makes a good UV layout versus a poor one well it really depends on your pipeline so maybe if you're working on a personal project or a project from film or video you have less stringent texture size requirements that will allow for maybe a sloppier or UV layout or UV layout that you're actually not packing as tight and you are wasting some pixels versus something that maybe you're gonna take into unreal unity a game engine where those texture sizes are gonna be small and you really can't waste any pixels regardless of which way your final assets gonna be rendered on having a UV set that's well laid out well waste less pixels and be more efficient so without further ado let's get on with the video so I'm gonna go ahead and UV unwrap this soda can here and I'm gonna cover some of the tools within the UV editor not every single tool some of them I don't use as much especially as Maya has progressed and got better with their current tool sets some of them were just kind of old school legacy stuff that I really don't touch so I'll mainly cover the ones that I currently use while working in Maya 2018 so here you want to go ahead and enable your UV editor here so we'll go ahead and get the UV editor and right here we have a whole clump of nastiness so before I get too deep into the tool I'm gonna cover some of the concepts that I explained in the intro one of them was distortion right so to get distortion well let's go ahead and apply a UV layout and see what I'm talking about as far as distortion so here you see that I currently have no UVs so I'm gonna go ahead and go to create and here um is a set of initial layouts that you could do or mappings that you could do so I'm gonna go ahead and select a cylindrical we'll go ahead and set project here and we'll kind of see how it's projecting this and it's actually wrapping them around the right way so if I wanted to rotate this right maybe our cylinder was facing down you could come down here in the options and change that but um it actually picked it up the the right way um how I have it here alright so now we should get something that looks a little bit better so now if I select this checkerboard icon you see that it's getting our checkerboard pattern on it so the checkerboard is kind of this Universal a way of applying a texture and saying you know what common distortion that we are getting right so here along the sides of this this actually looks pretty perfect right but now if we go on the top this looks pretty sloppy right that's because the way that it's being unwrapped it's going around the sides in a cylindrical way but the tops are actually not being really optimized and we have a lot of distortion so something like this would not really be ideal so old-school way you would just basically probably go in here and you could select let's select these guys here and I'm just growing my selection so kind of the old-school method before all the unwrapped tools would go is you would do this and then you could come down here to create and you could apply a planar but within the UV map editor here or the UV editor you can shift and right click and get those mapping options as well so we could do a planar map or we'll go to the option this is important because sometimes if you don't have this checked you'll get the mapping that you want but you'll get Distortion so I'll go ahead and check that and then we want to project from the top so we'll probably want to project from the Y and we'll hit project and there we go right so now we have a projection here from the top that's capturing the flat part and then we still have kind of cylindrical for the side so this is more of a old-school way but this is obviously something that you could do obviously here since you have kind of these areas that are going in and you have like a small dip here you're gonna get distortion here right so when you could do is take this and then we could apply and unfold so unfold so if I'll move this up here and I'll shift and right click we can go ahead and do an unfold right so I'll go ahead and do an unfold and you see that our distortion went away right so traditionally this is something that you had to do you had to start with kind of these basic projections figure things out and then I'm full so these projection methods still do have some value and you know there's plenty of good uses for them but I'm basically gonna be using the newer tools that were introduced in 2018 which I think they're truly just a game-changer as far as doing UV layout within Maya so what did I mean by the concept of Texel density well here we have two shells and we'll see that this is relatively larger than this guy right so this top one if we look at this this is actually a lot smaller therefore these are bigger so think about these checkers as individual pixels you'll see that having this shell this size is actually not a good use of Texel density and if we image we're gonna get a lot more distortion here a lot more pixelation on this top part than we are on this bottom part right and if we look here on the UV toolkit under tools we see that if we double-click this shell and we select get this ask the value of 28 and what do you guys think that this guy that smaller is gonna have as a value as far as the Texel density if we get it's gonna have a smaller value right so I'll hit get and now we have a value of 15 right so that has a smaller Texel density and once a texture is applied there's gonna be more distortion on that top part so one of the cool things that Maya has introduced in 2018 is that we could actually match these up to be the same exact text with density right so I'm gonna go ahead and scale this up and move it here right and now we could go ahead and match this so before I go ahead and do this there might be some instances that you might want this a Texel density different meaning like if I was doing a product shot and all you were gonna see is you know something like this and you not never saw the top of a can or maybe I'm panning around orbiting around here it's gonna be pre-rendered maybe I could have pretty much this gigantic UV set or UV layout for the bottom and not really care about these on that's never gonna be seen I'll select this shell here I'll hit get I'll get the bigger value and then I'll select this guy and I hit said right and now if we look at this this is the same Texel density right alright so here I have a UV layout and I'm actually gonna screw this up but don't worry we're gonna get back to this but usually what I like to do is just start out with a planar map right so it's gonna Jack all this up but that's fine and then I'm gonna go to my UV and then I'm gonna get my 3d cut and so UV tool you see that I already have this hotkey because I use it a lot so select this and here on the options make sure that you could just reset the tool here but the most important thing that you want to do is make sure that you have show UV shell coloring on and I'm gonna show you exactly what this does in a second so well this is gonna allow us to do is interactively place UV cut lines in in inside the 3d viewport which is really nice and speeds up your UV workflow so I want to make sure that I'm on edge selection here and if we think about about that cylindrical mapping that we first created it really ain't created a cut line at the top the bottom and down the side so we're gonna go ahead and mimic that but before I do I'll just show you pretty much what the tool does and its native state if you double-click kind of a edge selection it will place a border line right the cool thing about this is that it's non-destructive so you can go ahead and add and also the subtract from it so if you hold down control you'll go ahead and basically sew those edges or undo that cut line alright so if we think back about that original cylindrical mapping we had a cut line here right and you see as soon as we double-click we get an edge loop and we don't have those continues edges anymore it's gonna color code this and tell us that hey you know what this is now a different UV shell than this right and from this angle it's hard to see so I'm gonna go ahead and just run a quick unfold I'll go ahead and just select my faces I'll shift and right click go to unfold and then unfold again and now if I double click one of these UV shells right you see that this is now two separate UV shells right so let's go ahead and if I want to get back to the tool without digging all the way through what I could do it's just middle mouse click this and it'll redo the last menu command that I had set up alright so from here I'll go ahead and just hide the checkerboard for the time being and make sure edges is selected as well and then I do want to hide this this seemed as much as humanly possible hiding seams is not that big a deal like I used to now with packages like Mari and substance painter were you actually painting on the models seams are not the nightmare that they used to versus like the old-school Photoshop way but just kind of a best practices if you can't hide the seam or make it less obvious go ahead and do so so now we have another shell and so there's no need to unfold it anymore because we won't kind of have a good idea what it's going to look like and here we're getting a lot of distortion right so if we go here this shell we're getting a lot of distortion because we need a cut kind of like that cylindrical mapping to be able to fully on a wrap and unfold these shells properly so now if we're thinking about a product shot where we want that seam at well looking at this we probably would have one on the front because it has a logo the back would probably have the nutritional information so maybe somewhere along the side towards the back is where I want to place that cut line so I'll go ahead and double click here I'll go ahead and select my shell here by double clicking the faces I'll shift right-click unfold and then run another unfold now you see that we have a better UV layout so I'm just gonna go ahead and rotate this here and this kind of segues into the next tool that I like here which is the UV layout tool so I'm gonna go ahead and just select a lot of shells I'll go to my UV UV editor bring this guy up and just kind of bring this here so we could see the options so we have the layout option here if we shift where I click we'll get to the options the other method is if we have our UV editor up here we can shift right click go to layout and hit the little square that'll bring up the options I want to make sure that rotate shells are on I'll let it rotate shells if it needs it and then if you know kind of your orders texture map size that helps as well so ideally I'd probably shoot for a 2k for this product shot so I'll hit 2048 I'll hit out lay out you've ease it laid it out pretty efficiently it got even sexual density right so if we go here and we go to our we get a Texel density from the shell it should be the same one from this one right so Texel density is perfect the optimization is pretty good so if you were doing a layout for yourself personal project maybe something for film or video where you didn't have stringent textual requirements you know this would pretty much be all that you needed and that's good enough but good enough and this channel is just not gonna cut it so I'm gonna show you a way to really optimize these and really develop a UV layout for something that's incredibly well optimized and would work well within a game engine right so what I'm gonna do at this point is I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this can here right so and you'll see why I'm duplicating this in a second so we'll go ahead and do ctrl D and let's go ahead and I want to leave it where it is I'll bring up my outliner here I'll just name it original okay so I can go ahead and hide this one and then just work on this one so what do I want to do with this well these shells they worked out pretty well right what the top looks pretty good the bottom looks pretty good but for this side piece here we'd ideally want a square layout and this is not that bad but sometimes when you run this unfold you'll get things like C's or curves that really don't work that well as far as optimization in a square 101 UV space right so what can we do here well there is there is an old-school method called unit right what unitize is gonna do is for each polygon it's gonna basically assign eight a zero to one coordinate right so we pretty much want to work on the cut lines here now the problem with unit size is that it's gonna stack everything up and then finding these cut lines again can be problematic but there is a little workaround that I have right here so let's go ahead and bake in our UV seams into the mesh that way it's actually easier to find later once we unitize this one shell right so I'm gonna go in here and I'll select my border edges so I'll double click here this is the edges that we want to work with and then I will go ahead and go in here shift right click and then I will select detach so what the attach is gonna do is pretty much what it sounds like it's going to physically detach those components from the mesh so if I right click here now I could you see that those edges are no longer connected I could just simply peel that off right so now I'll go in what I'll do first is I'll just select these shells move them out the way double click this guy I'll go ahead and go to modify unit eyes and you see what this is gonna do it's gonna basically layout each polygon to its own zero to one space right but you see that this is not gonna work and obviously we got to go ahead and stitch this together so I'll go ahead and shift right click I'm sorry right click just make sure that I'm on edge mode and then once I select all the edges I can do shift right click move and so now we have basically our UV shell already laid out right and this would have been harder to actually find the border edges have we not done the detached components so now we just want to go ahead and scale down the shell a little bit so we still have some distortion and that's because this still needs to be unfolded but only in one direction and doing it only in one direction is what's gonna allow us to basically keep this perfect square shape that we have rectangular shape so what I'm gonna go in here and then I'll shift right-click and we can do an unfold and it looks like it's gonna be in the V which is the up and down so it's gonna unfold that way and now you see that we have this perfect UV layout so the last thing that we need to do besides just scaling that but we'll take care of that with the layout function is we have this mesh that's full of border edges so what I'm gonna do here is actually transfer the UVs from this mesh to the U to the mesh that actually had no border edges baked into the geometry so I want the one with the UVs that I want to project onto right that's gonna get transferred onto so I'll select the can and then this is the original one so I will ctrl click this I'll go to mesh and I'll go to transfer attributes option and what we want to do is just transfer this UV lamp right so what we need is the current UV set we want to make sure that all these are off you can't just go here and go to reset settings so I'll go to UV sets current I'll keep this on sample space world and I'll hit transfer so now we essentially transfer the good UV layout onto the mesh that the edges or components were not detached so now I'm gonna just basically delete my history so edit delete by type history we can go ahead and hide this guy right here the original I'm sorry we can go ahead and hide the can so now we're left with the mesh that we wanted with the UVs that we want right so what we could do is select these guys here shift right click and then we'll go ahead and go to layout and we'll go to layout UV and there we go so that is a nice looking set of you v's that is optimized for whether you're doing film personal project and more importantly if you're taking this into a game and like unity or unreal so some of you might be wondering well why didn't you use the strain UV tool within Maya and that's what works sometimes when it wants and sometimes what a dozen so if you don't if you're unaware with the tool what I recommend is you running it and see what happens I already tried this and didn't work on this particular object but I'm just gonna go here and then with this guy I'll go ahead and get my unfold which just kind of goes back to the layout that I had and what you could do is if you selected an edge here and then you shift and right click you can do something called strain shell right so that's gonna kind of strain the shell within the layout double-click shift right click and we can do something called straighten movies so this is what I get this is not optimal you could still try the tool depending on your object you can luck out and it might do a good job but most often than not I do get these issues versus just kind of the method that I showed you guys that works pretty much every time so this is the finished UV layout that I have that I basically did with the 3d cut and unfold tool like I showed you earlier that's all that I have for you guys thank you so much for tuning in make sure to like this video comment and please subscribe if you haven't done so as well for more videos like this if you'd like to see how the can was created you can go ahead and check out this video right here which I cover step by step the modeling of the can so appreciate your time as always and I will catch you next time Texel density depressing you UV Distortion because I'm gonna explain all these in my Maya UV layout for beginners tutorial learning UV is getting under your skin Texel density terrorize e-learning UV Texel destiny terrorizing you you visit because I'm gonna explain it in my mind [Music]

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 67,045

Rating: 4.9287724 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

Id: k1LygYsI17k

Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019