Texturing with UVs in Cinema 4D - Gain Total Control Over Your Materials

UV unwrapping in cinema4d used to be the bane to every one's existence but with the new UV workflow updates in cinema 4d s22 it's never been easier to learn this extremely useful skill when you wrap your head around what a UV is and the whole process of UV and wrapping it's like you have this superpower where you can finally accurately texture your models with ease and I'm gonna be walking you through the whole process of UV unwrapping cover the basics of UVs and how you can apply it to your own models now if you want to follow along with me be sure to download the free project files in the video description below [Music] now you these are the names of the horizontal in vertical axes of a plane since XYZ is already used for coordinates in 3d space now UV unwrapping is the process of flattening out a 3d model into 2d representation for texturing now things of a stuffed animal it's made by sewing together separated pieces of flat fabric based on a sewing pattern to create one sewn together stuffed animal so basically you vieng is that process of defining seams and then unsewn or unwrapping a model at its seams to flatten it out to easily texture UV mapping is then when you apply a texture and map it to your model utilizing those you've ease so why the need for you visa unwrapping at all well to demonstrate the why let's just start with a very simple case of a cube and if we went and double clicked in the material manager down here and opened up the material editor and just load it up say a tile texture or checkerboard texture even and apply this to our cube you'll see that this is mapped perfectly no stretch squares nothing like that now what happens if I make this a little longer well you're gonna see that the texture stretched out on these polygons that we actually made longer and the reason for that can be made more apparent if we actually go and check out the UVs of our object now remember the U these are just the 2d representation of a 3d object now to be able to generate a UV tag what we need to do is make this object editable because we can't Edit UVs on a primitive object okay so I'm going to hit C to make that cube editable and you'll see that that generated this uvw tag this holds all of the UV information for this piece of geometry so to view the UVs we're gonna go to our body paint UV edit layout and you'll see the 2d representation of our object here now if I go into my polygon mode here and select this polygon here you'll see that even though this is a you know pretty long stretched out polygon it's actually mapped to this UV texture view as a perfect square and this is why we have this stretched out texture okay so if I select this polygon here and move this around you'll see that all the UV editor is is showing how a texture is mapped to a single polygon so a UV corresponds with a 3d polygon face if I hit T for scale I can scale this down and you'll see that the pattern that grid pattern is actually getting bigger now to easily visualize this I'm just gonna go ahead and delete that material that checkerboard material and I'm gonna use a UV map instead so I'm gonna go to textures UV map and you can actually see a test UV pattern or grid that allows you to basically test how this pattern grid maps to an object and see if there's any issues with the UV x' like if there's any stretching or anything like that because if the pattern is stretched any texture will be stretched as well just like that checkerboard pattern so the whole process of UV unwrapping is trying to be able to adjust the UVs so a texture isn't stretched out so they're actually more visually representing the actual polygon space like this is a very you know horizontal polygon here and it's not represented like that in our 2d UV view so that's why we need to adjust and play around with the UVs the 2d representation of those polygons to make it match the actual physical 3d version of that polygon now in cinema 4d version s 22 and above there's a whole bunch of new ways to automatically fix this problem and this is done by new algorithms new workflows and things like that now the easiest way to fix something like this is to utilize the automatic UV options which try to automatically take the real 3d polygons space and actually have that represented in the 2d view so to do that in to utilize the automatic UVs I'm just going to make sure all of the polygons are selected so I'm going to hit command or ctrl a to select all of the UVs in the texture editor and I'm just gonna go to automatic UVs now it makes sense to use the cubic algorithm here because we have a cube and if we hit apply you're gonna see that check that out that polygons here was represented used to be represented as a square just like this polygons here you'll see that if I select the UV here it'll actually show me which polygon is corresponding with okay so if I select this polygon here you can see that check that out we have this UV stretched to the same size as the actual polygon is in our 3d view now let's go ahead and bring down the opacity of this UV grid if you don't see this menu just go to view configure and just go to this back tab and this is where you can adjust the UVs or you can even load up your own UV map or just turn off that UV map altogether I'm just gonna turn back on that UV map and you can see as I select each of these UV s the corresponding polygons that they are representing so you can see that ok if I bring this up even more the opacity you can see this d1 here that is this UV island so a UV island is basically polygons that are on their own little island space so this is technically you know UV island its own polygons it's on its own Island and you can see that this is the part of this UV grid texture that will be mapped to this polygon now again I can move this and you can see that's gonna change which part of this grid texture is mapped to that polygon surface now the whole reason you want to unwrap an object and map UVs correctly is you have this nice even distribution of say a grid texture so you have no distortion now what I want to do now is kind of show how this can kind of all fall apart if you don't have UV x' accurately represented to how that actual 3d polygons is as far as the shape the aspect ratio all that good stuff if I go into my point mode here I can select a point and move this and you'll see because we are adjusting this and changing the mapping of this texture notice I'm not actually adjusting the points in the actual 3d object but just how this polygons is mapping this texture you can see that if this is not a perfect you know in that same shape that same rectangular shape how this is getting distorted because we have this d2 here and it's representing this top corner and then we have this d3 and it's getting you know really janky right in here and that's because the UV is trying to map this texture this really you know parallelogram I don't know if that's really that's no this isn't a parallelogram but this polygons kind of shape in trying to map it as best it can to this perfectly rectangular shape okay so that's the whole thing is what UV mapping does is gives you the ability to fix things like that now not necessarily in the manual way I'm doing it now as I'm just selecting these points and trying to get back to that original rectangular position but you can see now how we can map a texture accurately without distortion now because as of right now these UVs are mapped pretty well to the actual you know shape in size of the actual 3d polygons now that's a very easy case just this cube so let's up the difficulty a little bit and show a way we can actually unwrap something manually alright so here is our mushroom and what we're gonna do is we're gonna show an example of when Auto unwrapping fails you and you have to figure out the whole unwrapping process manually okay so this this model will do us well to show the limitations of automatic unwrapping so let's go ahead and we have this UV tag already applied to it it's by default I basically made this mushroom using a wave object and we can go and visualize the UVs by going to body paint UV edit and if I select that mushroom we'll see the UV grid and let's see as far as our UV map how the texture distortion looks and you can see that week we have pretty heavy distortion here you know if I turn the subdivision surface on to smooth the polygons we have a lot of distortion especially at the top and bottom again we use that lathe object so we have a lot of weird mapping going on and we can actually see why this is is gonna be you know truncated like that by going to point mode and just selecting that point and you'll see okay that point is over here but one thing you'll notice is if I select this point I'm also selecting the same point there as well and if I select all of the points on this left side you'll see they all occupy the same spot so we have all these texture all this side of the texture here all getting funneled into one single points all these points are in just this one single point right here so that's why we have such extreme distortions so this automatic wrapping is not gonna help us at all same thing on this you can see if I select all the points over here no bueno there they're just all getting stretched and all getting funneled in the top here now what I ultimately want to do is map this so I can just simply paint on little dots or spots on the top of this mushroom cap and how we can do this is by using something called the body paint 3d paint feature which is basically like Photoshop for 3d objects where you can actually paint use brushes like Photoshop brushes and paint directly onto the surface of an object so let's go ahead and go into 3d paint layout and to set this up to be able to be painted on you can see the little brush tool here besides all this good stuff you can see that I can't actually paint on this just yet and what we need to do is actually set this up to be painted on we need to apply a texture to it so we can do this easily by going to the paint setup wizard we'll get the magical wizard out and you can see here's our subdivision surface in our mushroom they're checked on by default so those are the objects we want to set up for body paint I'll go to next and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna uncheck this recalculate UV we'll just use the existing UV even though it's wrong just because I want to demonstrate you know why you v's if they're that distorted how it can even screw up if you want to paint on directly onto the surface everything else here is good go to next and here's where we can create a new material and here is where we can choose what channels we want so if I go to color I can choose the default color it'll generate so maybe you're like a mushroom II color something like that and then we get to set the texture size so I just did to K so 248 by 248 and I'll go to finish and it'll do its thing you'll see that that texture that uh the color we chose for the color channels already applied you can see in the objects manager we have this new material here and you can see that this material colors six that if this is our default texture that we're using if I go to layers here's that background layer and we can go ahead and just add a new layer just like in Photoshop and paint directly on to at background-color so I'm gonna go into my brush and I can choose a color for the brush so let's say let's do red and again adjust the size here you'll notice that the brush is represented as a perfect circle but if I hover over this 3d object you'll see that if I just click this is not a perfect circle and why that is is because of our inaccurate in bad you v's okay you can see how this is really stretched out here if we went at the top here we're gonna get a really weird distorted paintbrush stroke and even at the bottom here I mean maybe right about here we're getting close to being a circle and have like a perfect dot but man like this is just really distorted especially as we go down here like this is just not gonna work but it is cool that we can just paint directly onto the surface here but all that to say is we need to do some work on those UVs if we want to just paint dots on the top okay so let's go into our UV edit mode and let's just delete that texture that we made we don't need it and let's go and zoom out and let's just select this uvw tag and let's just for a posterity let's go and choose one of these automatic UV options so for the cube example we choose cubic so we'll go and we'll choose apply and you'll see that we have all of these UV islands now let's go back to our view configure bring down this UV map opacity so we can actually see what's going on and if I deselect you can see all these UV Islands all these seams you can see this like patchwork of seams here represented as these highlighted edges that are highlighted white you just see how this distortion of this texture that UV grid is working it's just like you know I mentioned off the top that unwrapping is like unstitching a stuffed animal and how you unwrap something is by defining these seams which are these edges in white and the rule of thumb is you want the least amount of islands as possible because if you have too many you have the current situation that we're in right now where this looks like patchwork of different fabrics that are stitched together and if this was a teddy bear it would look like one from a horror film because it's you know stitched together in weird places like maybe and I'm all smishing I don't know but basically this is not gonna work for us okay so you also want to be able to have the seams where you can't see them visually okay so if you think of like a teddy bear there's gonna be a seam at the back of the spine because you don't really see it right and you know some of these seams are positioned pretty well like this seam right here if I go to the edge mode and select go to ul to get a loop selection this seam right here that's positioned pretty logistical II well because we can't see that seam right there and even at the bottom like this isn't that bad and even this loop selection here that seems not bad either especially if at the end of the day we're gonna apply a different material to the underneath of the cap using like a polygon selection and then same thing with a top so that's an a strategic place to place a seam is if you know you're applying a different material on you know polygon selection stuff like that that's fair game for seams so all that to say this unwrapping this automatic UV unwrapping did not go as planned so maybe we'll try out this pack maybe we'll get a little bit better result so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make sure I have all of my polygon selected so I'm gonna go to polygon mode I'll select one of these polygons and just go command or ctrl a to select them all and I'll apply this packed algorithm let's see what this does and you can see that we're back to that same issue we had before where you know these polygons are not pre represented well at all where if I select one of these polygons here you can see that okay maybe that's mapped correctly but what about this polygon here this is much more elongated than what it's visually represented as in our UV map and again it's like we're back to that cube where the polygons are represented accurately in a 2d view so that's why you get that stretching okay so pack doesn't work triangle and you'll see this is even worse like we have all this distortion it's it's sideways it's it's this isn't gonna work okay so this is where we delete the uvw tag and we set out to unwrap this ourselves now how you approach UV unwrapping is dictated by the model you're working with but it always helps to visualize how an object could be an stitched and flattened out to make a 2d sewing pattern so visualizing those seams so again maybe we have you know I know that if I go ul to get a loop selection if I select this seam right here I know that I'm gonna have like maybe a red material on the top here and another material at the bottom for the underneath of the cap so this is a good spot to place the seam now to make a seam and to basically cut this I'll just select that edge selection and then just simply go to UV unwrap now you'll see that we have two islands if I go to polygon mode and go to live selection and double click this island here you'll see this is all of these polygons represented right here and you can see that this UV grid texture is mapped flatly to the top here okay I'll go and my view configure all and bring up that opacity just a little bit so you can see how that textures mapped now if we were gonna do that checkerboard pattern or something like that this would actually be a lot of distortion but basically all we want to do is kind of flatten this out so if I select this polygon here it looks visually the same way it does in our 3d view and this will help me when I go to paint on the dots on the top using that body paint 3d paint feature okay so if I select this bottom island here and I look at that grid texture you can see we have a lot of distortion here as well especially at the bottom here not looking too good so what I can do to fix this distortion is number one I can go and maybe make another cut here because again I know that I'll probably have a different texture from say if I do ul to make a loop selection here so from this point to this point this loop selection will have one material and then from this loop select down I'll have another material so another thing that helps us is this seam will probably be hidden anyways so this is a great place for a seam so I already have one seam cut and the great thing about this is we can easily just iteratively add other seams on top of the seams we already defined so I'll just go and click UV unwrap and you'll see that now we have a flat map texture here and we still have all the distortion on the bottom of our mushroom here so we're gonna need to approach this a different way so how you can visualize this is if you are trying to unwrap say like a a sleeve or a cylinder like a sleeve of a jacket and basically if you if you think of how a jacket is is made you have the you where the wrist is so maybe we have like the cotton so if this is like where the wrist is will have a cut here and opening for our hand and then there's a seam you know somewhere along the back of your jacket again again you have the seam where you can't see it so let's go ahead and place a seam at the back of our mushroom here so this is this is the front and this is the back here so I will go and make a loop selection here and one thing I'm gonna do is check on this stop at selections because I already have this loop selection here and I added to it by holding the shift key down what I'll do is hold the shift key down here and make a loop selection right between these current selected loops and there we go and so you can see I have a loop selection at the bottom the back here and then right here and then I'll go ahead and just click UV unwrap and you'll see that we have a slightly distorted texture here but it's no longer massively distorted now if I go to my live selection mode and double click this area you can see here is our visual representation of this bit right here okay and we also have this little area here and that corresponds with that bottom and again we're probably not gonna see that bottom so it's it's fine but we kind of flattened this out and made this so it's not as heavily to store it as we had before so again if we applied a grid Tyrael to this by double-clicking and making a new material go into effects and going to surfaces checkerboard and apply that to the mushroom you'll see that this doesn't map I mean that's a little it doesn't look terrible but it doesn't look great okay so we have the distortion up here and all that good stuff so we could if we were actually applying a material to this and not just painting directly onto it we could do a little bit better work of this like we could double click here we can go to the transform tool here and this is almost like the transform tool in a Photoshop where we can just like rotate this and kind of straighten out how that grid is applied there okay another thing we can do is select all of the polygons here by hitting command or control a and going to this relaxed UV and what this does is it tries to prevent further distortions so it's trying to fix all the distortion here and we can visualize if there is any distortion on our UV map polygons by going to view and going to distortion and you can see that we have this heat map where anything that's blue is stretched and everything that's red is squashed and you can see that the heat map is fairly faint so not a lot of distortion going on but what we can do is again select all these polygons we'll just use the default ll cm and hit apply and you'll see that it changed a little bit what we can do is maybe try the other algorithm and see if that helps at all and you'll see that nope doesn't really doesn't really do that much but you can see that I can double click and move all this stuff around double click this I'm still in my transform tool and just try to you know even this out a little bit now another thing we can do is we know this is kind of cylindrical to some extent so what we can do is select this UV island and we can go into this projection method here and we could try a couple things we can see if cylinder works and you'll see this just made this UV island really big and I'll just scale this down and kind of move this and you can see that this actually maps pretty you know pretty well we have this distortion right here though and that's because right here this should actually be this polygon should actually be right there kind of like got on stitch so I can move this manually over here to fix that I can also go and select this edge this edge in this edge get out of my transform tool here and just go to the live selection and just select these edges and just go to UV weld and it will Stitch those polygons together and now what I can do is go into point mode and just start selecting and moving all of these points in kind of straighten them out a little bit and just manually fix it this way and you'll see that we no longer really have a lot of distortion so that's one way to fix that again it how you UV unwrap is completely dependent on your model so I think that's looking pretty good okay so that grid material is looking all right and now we can go and try to paint the dots on this again so I'm just gonna go and delete that material I'll apply that material that we created before and let's go into 3d paints body paint mode and actually you'll see we actually have some paint already on it so I'll just go to that later we paint it on and just delete it and create a new layer there so you can see here's my background go to the paint again and we'll just make sure that that layers turned on so again this is just like painting in Photoshop you'll see that now our cursor is a perfect circle so I can paint a dot there adjust the size paint a dot there paint it done here here and you know this is really a really cool way to texture a model now I'll be showing in just a little bit how you can actually export out your UV grid so you can actually paint directly in a Photoshop by exporting a material that you can paint on in Photoshop and then re-import into cinema 4d and apply that as a material apply that texture as a material so maybe we want to go down here and let's make a smiley face so so there's our little mushroom character that we UV unwrapped manually and tried a bunch of different methods of UV unwrapping and you know that this worked pretty well okay so now on to the final boss we are going to try to unwrap an actual character [Music] all right so here we go here is a more traditional character I'm calling this a sloth even though it might not look like much of a sloth and that's kind of where textures are really gonna help this character and so that's gonna be very dependent on a very good UV map so we're gonna have to unwrap this guy pretty good because this guy needs some pants or something so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start out just like we did with the mushroom character where we're gonna start defining seams by using loop selections and and strategically placing our seams and cuts to properly unwrap this character now again this this helps to try to think of how a stuffed animal of this character would be stitched together as well even visualizing how like a jacket is stitched together will help with the arms and legs or even jeans so always thinking of that to help tackle and approach UV unwrapping a character so let's go ahead and start by grabbing our loop selection by hitting UNL I'm just gonna zoom in here and let's just grab a loop selection around the neck there so just like we did with the top of the mushroom cap we made a loop selection and then we went to UV unwrap so we got two islands now one that represents the head if I go to my live selection tool and double click here you can see okay that's the head and this body that strangely looks like a sloth face is actually everything else okay so what we can do is we have no reference for like what the distortion is although just by visually looking at that flattened out version you can see that this is the top of the head and it's really smooshed you can see I'll spread out the actual 3d object is those edges so I'm guessing there's gonna be a lot of distortion so let's check that by going to textures UV map to get our UV texture applied me up I was right a lot of distortion going on here so this is not going to be all that great so what we need to do is we need to think of this head if we wanted to flatten out a head think of like a Halloween mask where if you want flatten out a mask you would have to do a lot more than just having a hole at the bottom of the head okay so some masks actually have a seam or a bit cut out the back of the head here or the back of the mask and that's exactly what we're gonna do here and instead of using a loop selection I'm gonna go and grab my path selection tool by going to U and M for path selection and I'm just gonna go and right where that loop selection is I'm gonna hold the shift key down to add to the selection and just shift in move on up and add this path selection here and just go right up the back of the head so right about there is pretty good we don't want to go so high that we might see this seam because again this is going to be a seam and with that loop selection and that seam there let's go and grab UV unwrap you'll see that that helped to flatten out in undistorted there no did nothing to help the body but you can see on the back of the head we have all this a little bit of distortion and that seam but again we're not we are not going to see that because we'll be seeing the front of the head and what we can do now is we can see if I go to my live selection tool and double-click this head here right now the head is vertical but we need to make it horizontal so we'll just go to our transform tool and just rotate this hold the shift key down to constrain two increments of five degrees and we just move this down and place it there okay and now we can go ahead and double click this UV island and we'll just move this out of the way now we need to make sure that all the UV all the polygons are within this UV map so we can just scale this down and it's fine because we're gonna be adjusting this UV island anyways as we start on stitching the arms and legs and all that good stuff alright so let's go back to our edge tool and go to our live selection and let's grab our loop tool so you L to grab our loop selection and I'm gonna grab again this is we need to think of this as if this was a jacket so how is a jacket stitch where you have the stitch right where the top of the sleeve is by your shoulder and then you probably have like a seam at the back of your jacket as well okay so what I'm gonna do is I'll grab my path selection again so um and I'll just grab let's just make sure that this is a nice complete loop yep this one this seam doesn't loop it loops weirdly right there you can see how it loops in the backside this is a good cut right here so actually what I'll do is I'll just click on this stop at selections and just click right here and hold the shift key down to add to selection so this will be a seam that goes through the fingers but then we have the seam on the front side so I don't want that we don't want to seem in the front so it'd be unseemly and we're just gonna deselect these edges here by command or control clicking and D selecting these bits here and do you select that and I think it's fine to have these seams here in the middle of the fingers cuz you're not gonna see them right and that's a good seam so we have the seam on the left arm so let's go ahead and mirror this onto the right side so what I'm gonna do is just mirror that selection by clicking the mirror selection tool and let's see if this worked and make sure that all those seams you get all the seams in there and you can actually see whoops this didn't go all the way through so why is that well if we go into this little gear here and click on that you can see that there is this tolerance option now depending on how perfectly symmetrical your model is you may have to up this tolerance because it's not sensing some of these edges so maybe let's do a tolerance of five and hit okay and doesn't look like it did anything so let's go ahead and look we're just gonna manually have to do this so that's fine we'll go in here click that edge click that edge and this one and make sure all that's all good to go so that looks good and that matches this side and now for the moment of truth let's unwrap boom ok and these islands look pretty good these are the arms right here and looking good so you can see that this island looks good as far as like we have up and down lines but you can see we have this a little diagonal here so I can double click on these islands go to my transform tool and just kind of align this Island the same rotational way as this island here just we can kind of get that nice and straight so this like this line right here on the grid is straight I think that's looking good now we can move on to the legs so this will be kind of like if you think about how we unstitch or how you stitched together jeans okay so let's go grab our UL for loop selection so you would have a stitch for one of the legs here right and then you'd have like a seam down the middle okay and then the seam on the side so we could do a loop selection like this where we have whoops let's grab this loop selection so grab whoops ul grab that loop selection again grab this loop selection here so you can see how this loops all the way around and this is basically like how you know seams of your pants would be a little bit I guess but I think this will look good and we have a seam here on the inside we have a seam on the outside so if you didn't want the seam on the outside you could always deselect it I guess I'll do that let's just deselect the seam here and then it's okay to have like a seam go right there and then we'll just go and do that mirror selection let's make sure this actually mirrored correctly looks like it did and we'll go to UV unwrap and you can see that now we have way less distortion on legs and here's the leg here so again we can also rotate these to be least in the same direction so something like this there we go and now all we have left is the torso so again if you think of a jacket or a t-shirt you would have like a seam around the edge here let's grab our loop selection again and what I'm going to do is reselect the arm loop let's uncheck this stop it selection here so we make sure we're getting all those loops and we'll make this loop selection on the leg and we'll make a loop selection on the neck and let's go ahead and mirror the selection so we have the loop on the right side of the body and basically what I'm gonna do you can do this one of two ways again depending on what texture you're applying like is it fine to have a seam here on the side or do you need to cut around the back of the character and unripe unwrap that way so let's do this two different way so we can do a seam just down the back here or we can do a seam around the outside here and have it basically like cut in two and it will flatten out both the front and the back so this is very dependent on what your texture is gonna be is it a big deal if you see a seam on the side here or are you just putting like a basic like color channel on it so that's very dependent on what you do there so I think what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna split this right down the side here so I am going to check on this stop at selections and select that select this right here you need to make sure I get the seam see this follows all the way up to right here and you'd go right under here grab that seam and then we will mirror it looks like we already got that side did we get this seam no we're just mirror and that seam will get selected and again though my the truth UV unwrap and you see how that flattened it out and it's almost like we have like a flak jacket I guess you can say where we have the bit on the front bit on the back and the texture is very undistorted which is really nice but again you have these seams right here so if that's a big deal you might have to go the alternate route where you just have a seam down the back and then you unwrap that way so I think this is looking pretty good we have everything kind of undistorted for the most part the head is probably the most distorted thing so there's one other thing that can help us with distortion and trying to organize our UV islands and all that good stuff so the first is if we look at our view and go to distortion you can see there's a lot of distortion on the head again this is the heat map where blue polygons are stretched and red polygons are squashed so we have a lot of source in there a little bit of distortion on the legs the torso looks pretty good but what I'm going to do is command or ctrl a to select all these polygons and I'm going to go to this relaxed UV and hit apply and we can do this multiple times we can try the other one see what that does really doesn't change all that much but this is looking a little bit better you saw a little bit of movement going on there and then what we can do at this point is organize all these UV Islands to maximize this texture space so we want to try to have all these islands fill up as much of this texture space as we can so we're not wasting this space okay so what we'll do is we'll use this geometric UV packing and just hit apply and you'll see that now everything's orientated different ways and we're filling out this whole texture square very nicely and you can see this kind of helped with how clean this grid looks as well so now what we can do is let's start painting let's go into body paint 3d and we're gonna do that wizard setup let's grab our wizard magical wizard and the only thing we're gonna be worried about is just the sloth SDS so we can uncheck all these other objects here so we had the eyes on the nose we don't want to texture those and we'll go to the sloths SDS and the sloth hit next we want to use the UVs we already made so we don't want to recalculate so we'll uncheck that and single material that's fine we can choose the color so maybe like a sloppy maybe he's gray like brownish gray something like that and hit OK so that'll be the color in the color channel of the material that's gonna be created and again we're gonna do two K so 2048 and 2048 for a 2k texture and finish close and here's the brush and you can see as I'm kind of going around it's going the brush tool up the size here you can see that that circle is not getting distorted into into an oval or anything like that and you can see we did a pretty good job of UV unwrapping now you'll notice the seams here as I go and use the paintbrush and remember there was a seam there so if I draw you know get like path so I'll undo that and this is looking pretty good so what we can do now is we can either paint details directly on our body paint layout and what I'm gonna do is go to my layers and make sure I'm not painting on the background but create a new layer and I can paint onto this I need to make sure I got new color so we'll make this darker and kind of paint the mouth like this well actually let's do this a little bit better let's let's be an artist here and draw so there we got the mouth and let's make the dark areas around the eyes and so we'll make the size a little bit bigger and you'll notice that as long as I'm hovering over this object that's in front of it it can't paint okay so this is where this projection painting will come in handy because we can actually just paint behind this eye and the important part about projection painting if I paint up here you'll see that it's just kind of painting flatly on our object there so you want to paint in your like a flat view like a flat projection and basically I can paint behind this eye and I can do something like this so make that little eye bit here now what you could possibly do as a workflow is you know it's kind of hard to paint everything in here so what you might want to do is paint details like this and clean it up in Photoshop because holy cow that's not good it's not a good job but what you could do instead is like you know precisely outline where you want that the eye black around the eyes of a sloth is and just like just for a guide and do something like this so like okay that's that's looking pretty good and if it had like you wanted to have like a white belly or something you can just go out of this mode here we can just paint like a little belly just like that maybe that's good enough you know that's good circle EJ I can do a circle maybe there's pads on the under the they have pads I don't know if they have pads on the arms or the hands but this one will have pads you can just easily paint things on like that maybe on the body here there's pads on the feet and again we can fix this in Photoshop we can use some of these other tools here there's an eraser we can erase stuff on this layer because again we're working on this top layer here and the underlying background color there is a blur tool and you know burn sponge there's a smudge and smear tool so we can like smear that and this is because of the UV seem so that's really not gonna probably help us that much but just didn't let you know that there are all these different tools here so again very much like Photoshop but as far as the workflow of using all this stuff as a guide and exporting this out to Photoshop so you can actually precisely draw on your details and just using this as a guide I just want to show you how you can save this out with the UV grid intact so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make the brush size about to a size of two so it's pretty small actually let's go to like one so pretty small and this is gonna be the brush stroke that will actually be used to highlight all of the UV lines here okay so what I'm gonna do is go to the UV 3d I'm gonna select the object select the material go back into the layers and what I'm gonna do is go into this texture tab this is where we can go to layer and choose outline polygons but of course it's grayed out because we don't have any polygons selected so if I go to my live selection tool and if these aren't selected automatically just click on one polygon command or ctrl a to select them all and we can go to layer outline polygons and actually I'm gonna undo that because what I want to do is create a new layer here first so I apply that grid to this top layer and now I'll go back to layer outline polygons it'll do its thing it'll use the color in the brush size to make that grid and let's go and just turn off let's go back to the view and you can turn on everything but this top layer and you can see there's that grid okay and if we want to save out all of these layers as say a Photoshop file we can go ahead go to texture go to file save texture as and since we have multiple layers let's grab a Photoshop will save out as a Photoshop file click OK and we'll just make this sloth PSD and this will have both the textured layer like the guides for the mouth and all that good stuff and then the grid layer and then the background as well so let's go ahead and hop into Photoshop and grab that sloth PSD and here we go we have the background with that grid layer and then some of the details so you can see if i zoom in right down here here is the eyes so those circles are where the eyes would be so we could actually just go in here and start accurately painting these details bring the opacity up there we can accurately place so much more accurate here I really need to give my hand-eye coordination on my Wacom going but you can see that you can paint in the details here paint in the details here much better job than I'm doing here's that mouth just all this to say is that you can make all these changes all these doodles that's the leg here's the back here's the arms I'm just scribbling at this point just to show you a point and we can turn off the grid okay we can even turn off the base layer and just have this as an overlay but what I'm gonna do is then save this out and then go back into cinema go back to my objects here let's go back to standard and we can load or actually replace this PSD just by reloading it and just say yes and there's the amazing creepy sloth but you can see all those textures are applied all those brushstrokes that we made in Photoshop and if you're a better artist than I am you can really make a fantastic texture with no distortion because again we are all reliance on that really good UV map that we made by unwrapping our model in a way that we could easily texture and add details on to this guy or you know we make this into the checkerboard sloth and just apply this texture onto him and you can see even that texture the checkerboard is not distorted very much at all again you know if we wanted to straighten out the legs I can see okay there's the legs there's that selection let's rotate this and kind of adjust that to try and straighten it out okay so this is like very basic level how to unwrap things but you can see that the workflow is very applicable depending on what model you're working on and I think the the main thing is that the procedural nature in which you can unwrap things like the neck first and then add the seam in the back and then see what that looks like and then unwrap the back and the arms and really audition cuts is a very flexible and easy way to get into UV unwrapping so you can make your own fantastic sloth with amazing textures so one last thing is this texture I mean it's a horrible texture to begin with but you can see that the resolution is pretty poor to fix that double-click on your material go into viewport and change the texture preview side from default to something like that to K because we've made that a 2k texture so once you do that you can see we have very high quality scribbles and know this wasn't a two-year-old texturing this it was a thirty seven-year-old alright so you may not be able to shoot lasers from your eyes or fly but you know how to UV unwrap now and that's basically the Superman equivalent of lasers shooting from your eye in the world of 3d now if you want to keep up to date with all of the latest happenings in the world of cinema 4d in mograph in general be sure to hit the subscribe button and I will see you in the next one [Music] [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 80,974

Rating: 4.9560018 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, cinema 4d, cinema 4d tutorial, cinema 4d r21, c4d r21, new features, cinema 4d new features, cinema 4d updates, c4d updates, c4d new features, c4d tutorial, cinema 4d subscription, new in r21, new in s22, cinema 4d s22, c4d s22

Id: 7UCV4urGm6E

Length: 52min 31sec (3151 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020