Unwrapping in 3ds Max: 03 Unwrap Modifier & Editor Basics

[Music] hello my name is Matthew mark wit and welcome back to the unwrapping in three studio max video tutorial series in this particular video titled unwrap modifier and editor basics we're gonna learn a little bit about the tools themselves so not necessarily the unwrapped process but the tools found in the unwrap UVW modifier and of course all of the stuff that we can find in the editor itself so let's jump into max and get started all right so if we obviously want to get into the unwrapped editor we gotta add one so the first thing I'm gonna do is select my object come over here to the modified tab and click the unwrap UVW modifier after that I'm gonna click on the open uvw editor button this is what it looks like inside the editor itself as you can tell I already did my unwrap I'm gonna grab the corner of my window here and pull it out to get a little bit more real estate now in order to navigate around inside the editor you have a couple of options one such option is clicking the middle mouse button holding it down to pan around then you can use the middle mouse button scroll wheel to zoom in and out however you can tell that it's kind of popping a bit while it's moving if you'd rather have a nice smooth zoom instead hold down ctrl alt and press down middle mouse button while moving up and down to get a more controlled zoom and finally if you make a selection and press the z key you can Center that selection within the window if nothing is selected you press the z key it will zoom extents it will also zoom extents if you have say a selection way off in space click off of it have nothing selected and hit it again you'll see that it'll Center all the UVs within the viewport alright so let's talk about some visual options within the editor now first and obvious UVs are in 2d I kind of mentioned that in my previous video you can also see the UV box that's within the center of my editor here that represents the workable area in which your texture is being represented if I put my UV x' outside the box then i intend on them repeating like in the case of a tiling texture however on this model i'm obviously doing a texture sheet as we can see all of my UVs have been compacted into the box within the editor you may have also noticed that within the UV box itself there's a checkered pattern being displayed behind the UVs you can control what's being displayed in the editor with this drop down menu here as I showed in the previous video you can also completely shut it on or off by pressing this button here if I turn it back on but I want it to repeat several times I can click this button here however this only repeats if I have my UV Islands within those spaces so if I was to say grab some of the UV islands here and move them you can now see whatever my UV Islands are encompassing I now have checkered textures in all of those same spots you can also repeat the texture without the UVs being in that space by clicking on this button here and going down to where it says tile bitmap and clicking the checkmark now if you look over in our UV space you'll see it's repeating molten times around the object that's controlled by the session called tiles over here which is by default set to 1 if you increase it to 2 and so on you can see you can tile it even more within the space once you're done hit OK to commit to the option so now let me talk about some of the default colors found within the UV editor which include green for the seams white for normal lines and blue for shared sub components at the moment I don't have anything selected so we're not gonna see any of that below but if I decide to grab any of these UVs including these over here in the corner we begin to see blue all over our object this blue represents as the name insinuates objects that are actually sharing sub components within the model themselves so if I say grab just one edge you can see this edge over here turn blue this actually means that this edge on the UV island at the top right and the UV island down here are actually the same edge on the model itself but have been split in the UV editor to create different UV Islands now if you're looking to change any of these default colors you can head back over to this option box again open it up and we can see the different swatches here such as the seams in fact we can even hide the seams by clicking this check mark or bring them back by clicking it again if I click on the color swatch below it it will bring up this dialog that allows me to change the color to whatever I want you can see it change in real time course I can always reset it or cancel it I don't need to go with it but if you guys want you obviously have the ability to change any of the colors you want within this options box you can also see the normal line color here and of course the show shared subs here you can also turn them on and off with this checkbox you can also add a grid by clicking on here and change the color of the grid with this swatch underneath it and finally you can change the background color here just the same as with anything else so the next topic I want to cover is selecting you v's if you look in the bottom left corner we have a vertex mode an edge mode a polygon mode and an element toggle mode selecting UV sub components works exactly the way you'd expect them to if I say zoom up here and in polygon mode go and grab a polygon you can see I can select just one if I want to add to that selection I can hit control to continue to add or take away from that selection by pressing and holding alt I can also do a box selection if I click and drag and don't forget you're crossing mode found up here that lets you choose how the box selection works if I say selected here so that it's in windowed mode only what's fully inside my selection will be selected and if I go back here and set it to crossing and come back in anything within my selection will be selected and finally if we go down and toggle the element mode here it will select an entire UV island so if I say select with poly and element mode on you can now see that it will completely select this element if I pick edges will do the same thing and of course vertices just the same just be sure to shut it off if you don't want to grab the entirety of the UV island you can also grow and shrink selections using these buttons here for example if I was to say grab a polygon in the middle of this UV island I can click the grow button to make it larger and of course the shrink button to make it smaller I can also say go into edge mode and use both the loop and ring tools found here if I click on an edge and click the loop UV button we can grab the entirety of the loop keep in mind that double clicking will do the same thing as far as a loop is concerned if I say click just one edge I can also grow the selection or shrink it using these buttons and the same could be said with rings if I can click on a edge right here we can either grab the entire ring set I can undo that or I can grow it or of course shrink it and the last tool is the paintbrush tool which allows me to paint selections or deselect with the Alt key another useful tool could be found lower here which is our frieze and our unfreeze tool if I say grab a selection we're gonna go over here and add element mode and grab this entire object I can freeze it this now prevents me from selecting or manipulating in any way if I want to unfreeze it I just go back click on a little fire emblem and now it's all available for selection and manipulation again it's also important to note that you don't have to select you v's just in the editor you can select them directly on the model you can see over here that if I grab any of the polygons within the model itself you'll see it also be selected within this window of course the vice-versa works just this you can see over here on the side that we have our vertex edge polygon and toggle element mode over here and grow and shrink selections along with looping and ringing but we also have some other selection tools that can help us while selecting on a model we can see down here that we can select by ignoring back faces so if I say I only want the stuff in the front of my selection I rotate around nothing's selected in the back I want it on of course if I shut that off and make a selection again it'll grab everything including the back faces behind the geometry you can also select by angle as you can see here we can toggle it with a default set to 15 degrees select a polygon here let's select all polygons within 15 degrees by the way if you hit f2 you can also change how the Polly's are being shown in their selection on the model so once again toggling f2 can either make it so you only see the edges or the edges plus the polygons highlighted but as I mentioned if we come over here with the angle we can change this to something higher and if I select again you'll see L select more based on the new angle I chose so we can toggle it off here we also have on this one select by smoothing group so if I click on this I can grab whatever is in smoothing group 1 or change it to smoothing group 2 and so on I could also select on symmetrical geometry using the X the Y and the z-axis but I'm not using any symmetrical geometry so I won't be able to show you that the last of the visibility things I want to talk about is be able to hide and show certain sections of both your model and the unwrapped so to save some time I already made a selection so let's just say I'm trying to unwrap this section of the object and it's a little hard to see underneath if I come down over here and click this button which is the display only selected polygons button it will hide everything else and allow me to work with just that geometry as you can see over here it just shows the UVs that I'm using also if I come back and click on it again I can toggle everything back on the button right next to it that's kind of the opposite if I actually click on this button and set it to hide I can hide whatever I have selected it doesn't affect what's in the viewport but it does affect what's in the UV editor if I want to bring it back I just click this button click on this eyeball and all of my you v's come back so the next topic I want to talk about is the transform tools found up here the first of which is move so if I select a UV island here it's pretty obvious that I can just grab it and move it around however if you want to keep it within an axis you can hold down shift and you can keep it so it stays going straight up and down or left and right you can also accomplish this by holding down your mouse on the move button up here and choosing the axis you want to restrict it to just remember to put it back when you're done next of course is rotation if we select rotation it does exactly what we think he'll even tell us right in the middle how many degrees were rotating if we hold down control we can actually snap it in 5 degree increments and if we hold down alt we can snap it in 1 degree increments and of course the next tool is your scale tool so if we click on this and select our object we can scale it universally if you want to restrict our scaling onto one axis hold down shift and you can scale it either sideways or up and down of course we can do the same thing once again by holding down our mouse up here and choosing the axis we want to restrict it on next is the freeform mode which lets us pretty much scale move and rotate in any direction we want all without having to keep selecting a new transform tool and lastly we have our mirror and our flip tool found right here if we select an object that's more obvious when it's rotating and mirroring if we come up here and click I can mirror it vertically I can mirror it horizontally I could also flip it vertically or flip it horizontally now if we look at the top right corner of our UV editor we find some additional transform tools under the quick transform section found here the first tool is the pivot tool if I was to say select an object and rotate it you see it rotates around the center of the object naturally however if I come over here and hold down my mouse I can choose where my pivot is going to be based on the selection so if I want it in the bottom right corner I can choose that there and then come over and rotate and it will rotate around that pivot instead of the center of course is where it's just the same for scaling and moving transforms also immediately following the pivot tool is the align tools that find right here these tools are best designed to use vertices and edges as opposed to polygons so I'm gonna grab this little object here I'm gonna move it down we'll zoom up on it so we can kind of see how it works and I'm gonna switch over to vertex mode and get out of element mode from here I'm gonna grab all of these vertices that kind of make this curvy line the way it works here is we have our horizontal and our vertical alignment if I click on the vertical alignment it'll take all these vertices and straighten them out if I was to use the horizontal alignment instead it would compact them into one point of course we don't want to do it in this situation but if say I wanted some of these vertices to be perfectly flat I can do the same thing using the horizontal tool instead of the vertical now if you click and hold down on either of these two alignment tools you'll see that there's a second option here let me show you how this particular option works so if I was to say go into edge mode and grab these edges all the way down by double-clicking them if I flatten them out vertically you can see it does the same thing as we saw with the vertices if I undo that and change it to the second command it looks like it's doing the same thing but actually something different is happening let me show you what I mean by that by grabbing a ring selection instead so I'm gonna undo this again in order to grab a ring selection you want to click on any edge hold down shift and click on adjacent edge now if I go back and click on that same button you'll notice that it'll straighten out all of them individually but keep them exactly where they were so the alignment tools allow us to straighten up both vertices and edges as needed so the next tool is the linear align tool I'm gonna come down here to this example and grab a couple sets of edges and then click the button so we can see what it does as you can tell it actually strains both edge loops but unlike the last set of align tools that create perfect vertical and horizontal lines this tool takes the average angle of all the selected edges and straightens them to match the next tool underneath it is the align to edge tool this one works pretty simply also let's just say I want to rotate this object to be perfectly straight well I can grab the rotation tool and try to eyeball it but even easier yet it's a select one edge that I want to align it to click this button and you'll see L straighten it out the next set of tools are your rotational tools so you can rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise or 90 degrees clockwise this also rotates around the pivot so if we change the pivot point so come back over here to the freeform tool and click on this and move it say to a corner and then rotate it you'll see a rotate around that pivot instead then the last two sets of tools that we see over here are your vertically and horizontally spacing tools the way this works is let's just say I want to grab a bunch of vertices here I can grab this edge here hold down ctrl and select the vertex mode to convert my edge selection into a vert selection keep in mind this method will convert any sub component to another with this I can then click on this button here say the space horizontally you'll see that actually space each one of these vertices exactly equal distance from the last this is a little bit of an optical illusion that it doesn't look like they're spaced exactly but they are if I was to say grab all of them it would do the same thing of course this works the same way vertically as it does horizontally depending on which tool you use the next set of tools on a list of the brush tools these tools actually help you paint and relax vertices within the UVs they tend to work best with high poly and dense UV Islands however I don't have any of those in my scene so I'm not gonna demo it for this video but if you want to learn how to do it go to Max's official documentation which I'll link below so the next tools after brush are reshape elements tools you'll actually see at the very first one which is straight and selection is grayed out that's because it only works in poly mode so I'm gonna come down here select poly mode and now you'll see it's selectable I'm going to grab this entire UV island here and I'll show you what it does when you click on this button it'll actually straighten all the lines out within the entire island so very similar to a lot of the line tools that we found up here it actually will do it all at once and keep in mind this is not a miracle tool as it will actually create distortion quite often if you're not paying attention but it does a pretty good job of making minor tweaks or curvy islands I got another example here if i zoom out you see this big object here has a lot more stuff going on if I was to say grab this island and press the button again you'll see that I'll give me some weird funky results keep in mind it works best with quads and long sets of loops and rings and because this particular object did not have them it didn't give us desired results so if I undo that say grab just the selection here and break it off by right-clicking and choosing break I can move the set of UV islands off now with this Island here I can grab this and press the button again and much better results because of the continuous quads loops and rings we see here the last two tools over here are two different relaxed tools relaxed tools basically make the shape of the UVs closer to the shape of the object on the actual model if I was to say grab this UV Island here and turn on f2 so we can see it highlighted better we can tell what's being selected on the model notice how our checkers are pretty off when we use relaxed tools it actually will get the shape closer and closer to the original shape of the object to make sure that the checkers actually look like boxes so if I come over here and click this first button which is relaxed until flat we get these kind of results which are pretty good however if you want more control over your relaxed go to the next button if I click over here undo what I just did and click on this we have a relaxed custom button if you click and hold your mouse down however you can grab the settings open up the settings and it allows you to choose different things you can relax your island by polygon angles if we click down the drop down we can see also edge and centers we can change the iterations the amount the stretch we can even keep the boundaries fixed when we're relaxing if I was to say hit start relax you can see it keeps going until we hit stop now in certain particular situations that might keep going and going especially if you don't have your UV Islands cut in a certain way often I find people like to set the amount all the way up to one before they start the relax just to see what the set boundaries does if I undo this again and click on and keep the boundaries fixed and hit start relax you'll see it keeps the outside edge seems the same but it will relax the interior components either way the relaxed tools as powerful as they are have been somewhat replaced by the peel tools which we'll talk about a little bit later though they're still very useful in many situations next on the list are the stitch tools in order to demo this I'm gonna grab this section here once again break it off and move it off to the side now the way this works is let's say I grab edges here and click all the way down we know that this edge of course is linked to this edge both obviously on this pink line here on the model but on this blue line shown in the UV island so with these particular edges selected if I click this button which is stitch the target it will move your selection to where the shared sub components are if I undo that and instead choose this one which is stitch average it will move both the selection and the shared sub components to the average distance between the two of them and if I use this third one called stitch to source it will move my shared sub components to my selection to be fair I find that these situations tend not to work very well so I don't usually use the first three stitch tools the last tool is my best friend which in this case is stitch custom if you click on that will actually move a UV island to match so if I click here with my edges selected it will move that other Island to stitch there and we don't get any weird distortion when it a verge is the two edges in between also note while stitching edges work best just be sure to choose all the seam edges you want a stitch as the tool will only connect the edges in your selection you can even affect some of the settings by holding down the mouse clicking over here and selecting the settings tool which will give you a few options to change how the settings work so the next set of tools just found out of the explode section I reset my UVs so that we can show how it works a little bit better the first tool right here is the break tool if I was to say grab these edges and move them you see they're connected however if I click this button they'll break which is pretty much the same thing as if I right click and hit break over here as I showed before the next four tools found here are all ways of letting max quickly and automatically decide how to break up your unwrap for you just note none of these methods are perfect so just clicking on them and calling it a day won't give you optimal results rather they'll help you get 70% of the way there and then you'll clean up and control the rest manually explain more about that in the unwrapped process video the first of the options is flatten by polygon angle which is set by 60 degrees by default and can't be changed if I click on the button you can see what happens the next option here is flatten by smoothing groups so if you're smart and you change your smoothing groups appropriately this one actually is pretty useful the next one after that is flattened by material ID so just the same as smoothing groups if you choose material IDs you can flatten that way also by the way if you don't know how to do that you can actually come over here on the side and the unwrap UVW modifier and you can both set your IDs and select IDs over here finally the last of the options is the custom tool but the real power is going into the settings so if you click and hold your mouse down and choose the settings here I'll bring up this dialog box this will effectively allow you change the polygon angle threshold that you want to use instead of the default 60 on the polygon angle tool they'll change the spacing which is how much space is in between each of the UVs it allows you to normalize clusters which means it will resize them to fit them inside the box it will allow you to rotate clusters and the last one will fill in any holes within the u-visa themselves so if I click on this and say shut off by material IDs here and hit OK you'll see the empty space of these UVs are filled in with other smaller UV Islands underneath the flattening tools is the weld tools found here you'll actually see that if you don't have vertices selected you won't be allowed to target weld however you can choose the next option on the side which is weld subcomponent if I say grab these two objects here and then click this button I can weld those two sub components together all depending on the threshold that I have set here if the distance is appropriate if nothing works when you click on it just increase the threshold now let me undo that the other option which if I click on the vertex mode here will then be highlighted which is target weld if I click on that I can grab any vertices and then you see the W on the icon move it over and weld it to another object over here if I do the same thing to this top part over here you'll see that this green line now turns white because it's welded together you can do the same thing by right-clicking and choosing target weld here or you can also highlight a couple of objects and click weld selected which works the same as our welding sub components here the next section is peel which is found here it's a pretty important section in my opinion because as I mentioned before it replaces the relaxed tools with more modern tools let's see how this whole thing works if I say come up over here and grab this particular UV Island move it up and let's just say we push it or so a little bit so that we're having some stretching UVs over here if I was to press the quick peel button you'll see what it does it actually fixes up the UVs pretty well now what it does is it also fits it within a UV box but it fits it based on what was selected in this case I only have one UV island so little scale it up large and fit it within the UV box if I was to say move it out of the box you can kind of see how it looks it's obviously way larger than anything else so the Texel density is a bit off that's why we're seeing more boxes in here but really the point is to show how powerful this tool is as it automatically relaxes things for us immediately following quick peel over here is the peel mode to demo this I'm going to use this object right here I'm gonna select it turn on peel mode and kind of move it down so we can see what's going on now you might notice it does the same thing as quick peel except for now it's actually active and allows us to manipulate our UV island in real time you might also notice these two blue vertices which are actually known as pins in order to manipulate them we can only do that in vertex mode so I'm gonna come down here and click on vertex mode now you might also notice that by default this button is on which is auto pin move vertices this means if I select any vertices they automatically become pins I'm gonna shut this off right now to demo how these pins work so if I say grab one of these pins here and move it you can see how it manipulates the UV Island course with only two pins it can only do so much if I was to say add a new pin say grab a new vertice which by the way I can't move unless it becomes a pin I can come down here and click on pin selected and turn that vertice into a pin also now if I was the same move this pin around you can see how it manipulates the UV I lit a little bit differently we of course can select new vertices and press this button and new pins or as I mentioned before just leave this Auto pin on so every time I select a vertice it automatically turns into a pin that allows us to manipulate our object you can also delete pins by clicking this button here lastly I'm not really sure if there's a way to do it properly but the only way I know how to get rid of the pins themselves within the UV editor is to shut it off flatten out the editor and add a new unwrap UVW and open that up which now you can see the blue pins are gone you might have noticed by now that the pule tools can likewise be found over here on the modifier you can also tell that there's some extra buttons including Pelt mode well the pelt tool used to be pretty useful I feel that peel mode is completely replaced it there's also some tools down here under scenes that help us manipulate our seams real time so let me show you how these work the first of which is the Edit seams button right here if you click on that and actually go into your model and I press f4 to bring up my lines anytime I click on an edge it's going to turn edge into a seam which is highlighted blue within the editor now if I use the peel mode it will automatically use that as a seam when it makes its calculations you can also click on the point to point seam editor right here this allows us to click one point and then another point and it'll draw a seam between the two for example if I was to say zoom up over here and click up at the top and then go all the way down at the bottom it will turn that into a seam you also notice in real-time it will show you what it's going to do when you click on any point with an orange preview line then the last tool which only works in edge mode over here is convert edge into a selection this basically means if I'm just going around and clicking on edges if I press this button it automatically convert them into a scene the next section of tools within the UV editor is the arrange elements found here this also happens to be some of the more important tools found within the program as the name suggests this is actually a way to automatically pack our UVs to help us save some time the UVs that you see in my scene right now we're done using quick peel and you can tell that they're not packed very efficiently the most important of all the buttons is actually this one right here which is our pack custom I'm just pressing it will pack ru V's but if we click and hold our mouse down we can change the settings that control more of the things that we need to do the first is the type of packing I find in general non-convex which the default works the best the padding is the distance in between the UVs which was mentioned previously in one of my other videos I've actually set it to point zero zero one the next three which is normalized rotate and fill holes have all been described in previous tools the one new checkbox is rescale clusters what rescale clusters does is it allows max to scale the UV Islands in relation to each other resulting in a perfect one-to-one Texel density so unless there's a particular reason why you want your text will density different leaving this on can be extremely helpful once you have all the settings the way that you want click OK and you'll see the results are pretty good the tool immediately following the pack custom is the rescale elements button which is basically the same thing as that checkbox I just mentioned it's a way to take all of your elements and make them one-to-one as far as Texel density is concerned the last area in the UV editor is the properties area which allows you to group UV islands together keeping their proximity and scale in relation to each other even when you're using the automatic packing tools that we just saw for example if I was to say take this object over here and this other UV Island here and place them side-by-side perhaps even mirroring them so it kind of looks like a 96 and then say grab this object here and this object and scale it up if I was to say grab both of these items and group them using this button and take these two items and group them using this button now if I select all my UVs with ctrl a and press the pack custom tool you'll see I'll pack my movies together but notice how it kept these two items together in their same relation and the same thing over here I actually changed the Texel density on this outer ring when I scaled it up notice after I hit the pack button even though it had rescale clusters on it didn't automatically update the Texel density remember groups keep the relative size and proportions of the UV Islands together even after using automatic packing tools now of course if I want these groups to be broken I can select them and click this button here and unselect a group or I can select groups pressing this button here so I want to wrap up this video by showing all the rest of the stuff that's left on the unwrap modifier itself since we finished the editor so coming over here on the side going to the first thing we haven't talked about yet is this button right here which is quick planar this is actually a quick and easy way to create a UV island without doing the automatic tools so if say I wanted to grab a bunch of polygons on my geometry here so we open this up when polygon mode I grab all of these I can automatically make a UV island out of them by pressing this quick planar button this also helps quite often when you're having issues with a certain section if you want to kind of reset it or fix it by the way don't forget to relax your uvz after using quick planar because it doesn't do that for you automatically as it just takes the selection and stretches and scales it to fit within the UV box next is channels the channel section basically allows you to have more than one set of UVs on an object at the same time so you can actually set a second channel and so on this way you can have your normal UVs on one and then maybe like lightmap UVs on the second channel or whatever after that is the projection tools these are pretty outdated but just like how we had that quick planer before you can do a planar selection the cylindrical a spherical map and a box map and then a bunch of other settings that kind of help them out but as I mentioned a little bit outdated now the next set of tools under wrap are basically useful for spline modeling and for unwrapping a strip such as a road or a highway or something like that I don't have any of that kind of geometry in my scene so check out the official 3d studio max documentation if you want to learn more and lastly we have some visual options for our seams down here which allows us to turn on and off our seams within the editors you can see here it also can shut off the peel scenes which those blue seams we saw before on and off with this checkbox lastly you can make them either thick or thin by choosing these two options if I thin them out you'll see it makes them a little bit smaller so that basically wraps up everything I wanted to talk about as far as the tools go within the editor and the modifier itself so hopefully this was helpful and I will see you guys in the next video

Channel: Matthew Marquit

Views: 1,877

Keywords: 3ds max, 3dsmax, max, max 2019, 2019, game development, texturing, texture, unwrapping, uvs, uv's, uv, uv packing, packing, texture sheet, texel density, texel, pixel density, checker texture, applying textures, uv distortion, uv island, seams, padding, scale, wrapping, relaxing, relaxing UVs, game, game texturing, textures, videogame development, game art, game production, texturing pipeline, 2018, uv editor, uv modifier, edit uvs, edit uvw, Unwrap UVW Modifier

Id: 7kV3JZEKVTA

Length: 30min 36sec (1836 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 12 2018