UNWRAPPING Tutorial for Blender (The Easy Way)

UV unwrapping is something a lot of people are scared of and tend to over complicate and think is a boring process but with this video I want to hopefully prove that I don't think this is the case I think UV unwrapping is really easy and also really fun as long as you know how to approach it correctly so let's get started now before we get into it if you want something a little bit more kind of um congested into one page I do have a PDF on my website the UV unwrapping guide if you want to download that kind of shows the best tips that I use for unwrapping you can kind of use it as a reference so check that out Link in the description now what I want to do here is show you my thought process behind unwrapping hard surface models specifically and where exactly you should be placing your seams now before we do any of that we need to add in a checkered texture so we can actually preview those UVS so I'm just going to add a material I can name the material whatever you want I'll call it UVS and we're going to go to the Shader editor here and if you just press shift a and add in an image texture and then we go to make this like 4K or something now you can name this whatever you want and then all we need to do is change this over to UV grid and if we connect this up now when we go into material mode we're going to see a nice Checker texture or maybe not you're going to see some sort of color here now if I were to just go into edit mode in smart UV project so U and then smart EV project everything you're going to see we kind of have like this automated unwrap now I never recommend automated unwraps like this unless you're quickly concepting because the same placement is atrocious you can see all these very clear discontinuities so I always like doing my seams manually it's a very good skill to have so let's go ahead and start marking our seams now one thing I'd recommend you do is go up here and turn on this live unwrap feature so whenever you mark a seam on an edge it'll actually update your um your UVS but first we need to actually click unwrap and then whenever we Mark a seam it's just going to update it so make sure that feature is turned on now generally what I tell people is your seam should go on the hard edges of your model and you're going to see if I go up here to select sharp edges like I've shown in previous videos not all of these edges really get selected because I actually have a bevel on every single hard Edge so for example although the top here does look hard it's actually not technically because I have a bevel here so the angle isn't as um defined but anyways what you want to do is you want to picture the edges where if you rub your finger against it you would probably you know feel um it would feel sharper than like a flat area for example if I rub my finger along this not going to feel anything but if I say I rub my finger along this Edge it's going to be a little bit more well defined potentially even sharp so those are the ways you should think about sharp edges on your models and that is where you want to place all of your seams as just a base explanation we're gonna obviously there's exceptions to that as I'll show you in this video but right now what we need to do is place all of our seams on those quote unquote sharp edges now you might be wondering in a case like this where I actually have bevels you know along here which Edge should I put it on should I put it on this one or this one or on this one and to answer your question I usually put my seams on the outer ones so we're just going to go here and right click and Mark seam go into material mode and I'm going to put all my seams on these more outer portions here so what we're going to do is alt click here now make sure the selection doesn't leak into this area because we don't need these inside areas marked just these outside areas here so we're going to do that and technically since this is symmetrical I can just do one side and then you know symmetrize to the other with mesh machine I could kind of save some time but you know it's going to look like a complete mess as we go through this process but eventually the more we get these areas selected the more um you know the more clean results we're going to have so we'll mark a seam here and like I said I'm just following along the outside portions of this model here nothing crazy so let's all click on this one Mark the same and then we'll just kind of connect these together Mark the seam and these we can unmark we don't need those let me just quickly symmetrize to the other side and if you ever symmetrize make sure you just unwrap it again so it'll update and you're going to see already we have a much cleaner looking layout we have very clean straight UVS in this area because basically all of these UVS are contained into this one space and they're not kind of like leaking and wrapping around so the more you mark these on the sharp edges of your model the more of these clean results you're going to get you can see how nicely that one updated now we're going to eventually get into situations where this isn't going to exactly do the job completely and don't worry I'm going to explain those but for right now I really want you guys to just focus on getting those seams marked on those hard edges here symmetries and symmetrize that looks pretty good and you can just see the more we do this the more of a clean result we're getting let me just go into the inside portion here because I also have some I need to mark on the inside and by the way if alt click doesn't work you can select an edge and then alt click the same Edge if you have mesh machine installed it's a pretty useful feature so that way you don't have to like you know manually click around we're going to Mark the seam on that and just to save time I'll symmetrize there and then there you can unwrap it and so far so good and then I'm just going to go in here and mark the C on these little notches down here let's make that look nice and clean so although we've basically marked every single sharp edge on this model you're going to see that the outside portion here is still extremely warped distorted overall just a weird looking whereas you know areas like these are actually pretty clean now this is where I'm going to talk about a concept called Rings if you've seen my unwrapping videos before picture um you probably know this but picture a a paper a piece of paper right and you take both ends of that piece of paper and you tape it together what are you going to have you're going to have a piece of paper that is in the shape of a ring okay now what if you wanted to take that ring and flatten it out again we just have to remove the piece of tape right and this is essentially What's Happening Here with this type of situation if I go into face mode and press the L key and I go into the UV editor just hop in you're going to see that this kind of takes on the formation of what looks like a ring almost it's completely cyclic and connected together and almost looks like a ring so we need to do is we need to flatten out that ring so that way the UVS flatten out nicely as well and the way we do that in terms of that tape analogy removing the piece of tape to flatten it would be the same as adding a seam here in a blender so you want to be very particular about where you mark your seams guys because for example I could Mark a seam basically I just have to connect these anywhere I could put a seam right here and you're going to see um once I do that it'll actually update pretty nicely but the issue here is there's a much better location I could have put this seam to avoid this very clear you know discontinuity we have from that seam and in a situation like this I just want to use seams that kind of already exist to limit you know how much of that seam I have to really show so for example this is a much smaller distance compared to having it go all the way down you see what I mean so we could put a seam there and then to close off that ring we also have to put one down here so make sure these are fully connected because even if you have like a slight mismatch right here it's not going to work so just make sure you have these seams fully connected together and guess what now when I press the L key you're going to see that we don't have a ring anymore it's actually flattened out more or less and this is the First Fundamental rule of UVS you want to keep these UVS as straight and clean like this as possible because the more Rings you have the harder it is to pack the islands and the more distorted your UVS are going to look see what I mean imagine you're like a like a coloring book and you crumple that piece of paper whatever like page you had it's going to be like all distorted and weird looking you're not going to really be able to like make out what type of texture is going on so kind of the same idea you want to make sure These are nice and flat now we have another ring right here if I press the L key that's mainly because I haven't really focused on the inside yet okay now just for um reference if this is a game asset here technically either side here could be the front because they're symmetrical but say like you know you have like a difference on each side and one side was like the back that you weren't going to see that's where you would actually want to place the seam so for example if this was going to go against a wall in a game or something this would be the good spot to place the seam because then when it's against the wall you're not going to see that discontinuity there so just keep that in mind try to play seem strategically based on how the model is going to be oriented in the game and if you don't know you know just do it as best you can so let's pretend this is the back of this um model here hence where I put the seams and actually probably be an even better idea to put the seam you know like right here instead it's even further back so we're going to do that but the seam here so it's even further back and then same for right here once again make sure these are connected and that's just going to be pushed a little bit further back here so like I said if this is meant to be the back of the crate then this is going to be the front so now you might be thinking okay so we're just going to put the seams for the inside because we have a big ring on the inside we're going to put those seams in the back as well so you know and also I forgot to mark a seam here on the top on this hard Edge so let me do that real quick there we go but as for the ring here on the inside you might be thinking okay back of the crate let's put a seam right here we'll mark a seam looks better and also down here this is technically a hard Edge as well so we can close that off by marking a seam and there we go so I can just symmetrize that one over and unwrap it and already it's looking a lot better but technically this would actually be a bad place to mark that seam whereas this would be a good place to mark this seam and the reason for that might not be super obvious this is just something you kind of get used to and feel intuitively after doing this long enough but let me explain why so if this is meant to be the back of the crate where we're not going to see this seam if we're facing the front of the crate most of the time which seam are we going to see way more one that's positioned here or one that's actually positioned right here behind the front see what I mean now if I'm facing the crate this way in a game this seam is going to be a lot more obvious now obviously if I'm facing it from the back doesn't really matter but you get the idea this seam when faced from the front of the crate is going to be a lot more obvious to the viewer so they're just mask that seem a little bit better instead of placing them here let's place them right behind the front and hopefully that makes sense guys you have to be very strategic about where you place these because a lot of people although they know how to unwrap they don't think strategically about where to actually Place their seams when you could have a much better result and look at how much cleaner these UVS look guys a lot better A lot more straight a little bit bent here not a big deal but you're going to see since these are mostly completely straight we have a much cleaner result here which I like now we do have a few rings right here if I press the L key with the sync Island select turned on it'll actually select where those rings are and this is another situation where we need to flatten out these Rings we can kind of see and here we have a ring kind of going around so to flatten out that ring let's put a seam since the character in the game would probably be taller than this then it would probably be best to put the seam here on the top and now you're going to see this one is nice and straight and we can do one here as well and then since the symmetrical I could just symmetrize that way and then that way and then just unwrap it again and now you're going to see we have these nice you know straight UVS here perfect so hopefully as I begin to do this more you begin to realize that this isn't really that complex a lot of people like to over complicate this stuff but you know when you look at it it's really not that complex and I actually just realized I accidentally when I did that symmetry to the other side ended up canceling these seams out so let me just add them again real quick be careful when you're doing symmetry because you might accidentally symmetrize a side that doesn't have seams and then remove the old ones anyways not that big of a deal okay so this is a pretty clean unwrap I don't have too much um too much beef with this unwrap overall it's pretty straight uh pretty clean and I'm I'm happy with it now there are a few things we could do to make this even more efficiently packed because right now this piece is occupying all the way from the left all the way to the right and if I try to pack this with something like a UV pack master I'm just not going to be able to pack as efficiently because this one is just hogging all the space you see what I mean so what you might want to do as an example is maybe you know take this piece and just chop it in half somehow so for example instead of having just one seam here in the back maybe I could have you know symmetries over and have another seam there so just basically going to kind of separate this even more from that long elongated piece see what I mean we kind of chopped that off and now it's separate so now we have a little bit more space to actually pack those islands and I'll show you the pack in a minute but if I show you the before and after you can see you know placing a seam here it just completely makes the resolution even higher once I unwrap it see what I mean resolution's a lot higher so it's exploding UV islands is a very good idea so long as you're not compromising the quality because if you have you know seams everywhere technically if I just you know Mark to seam in every single spot we're gonna have a pretty clean you know occupation here but at what cost a complete mess you see what I mean so just try to do that strategically do it where you can and it's just going to be a much cleaner result all around now you might notice that we also have another ring right here you can kind of see it's in the formation of one technically you don't really need to worry about a ring that's in this formation because if we take a look at how the UVS are projected it's actually completely fine because this is on a flat surface and also there's no sort of distortion so Rings like this are actually acceptable because the UVS aren't distorted at all the main issues with the rings are when they wrap around in a corner like this kind of three-dimensionally but on flat surfaces they're actually totally fine so don't worry about them so when I take a look at this if I kind of zoom in there's a little bit of warping going on right here just because of the way the topology is you can kind of see that here it's a little bit warped a little bit strange not that big of a deal not too much for me to concern myself with too much it's more or less consistent right here and also make sure guys I don't think I mentioned it yet but when you unwrap I would highly recommend changing this method here to conformal angle bass sometimes goes a bit crazy I always use conformal when I'm doing UV unwrapping with hard surface models it just projects a little bit nicer so like I said this little Distortion up here is not too big of a concern for me to waste my time on I'm mainly worried about massive distortions they're going to cause a very clear issue when I texture this inside of something like substance painter but now guys what we have is a very clean unwrap putting the seams only in areas we need the most and I also noticed right here because I symmetrized I also put the seams there by accident so let me just remove those and now we have you know a very clean honor app with not too many seams and you know we use as little as possible that we could actually get away with so now we need to do is pack our Islands so if you've seen any videos on UVS before you've probably heard people say you need to occupy as much UV space as possible while this is not incorrect it's also not always correct because there's external factors that are not being considered for example if you're working on a team and you have a specific textile density requirement I won't discuss Texel density in this video but basically what it is is it's a certain resolution requirement so say you had a crate and then you had like a barrel next to it but the barrel had like a really low blurry resolution and this one had a very high clean resolution it would look weird so oftentimes you'll have like certain textile density requirements certain resolution requirements that you must follow so that way that issue doesn't happen ideally this crate would be the same resolution as all the other models around it so you know occupying this entire UV square is a good thing but if you actually want to reduce the resolution it would do the exact opposite effect but that's a topic for another video I just want to show you how to get as clean of a pack here as possible so before you do that make sure you split up as many islands as possible I could technically you know Mark more seams on this one if I wanted to but those are going to be a bit more obvious especially if I start putting them on the side and whatnot even though I could split this up more the juice isn't worth the squeeze so what we're going to do here is we're going to use UV pack Master now I'd highly recommend getting this because this is the best packing tool on the market there is a packer here in blender but it is not very good and is not going to give you that professional quality result that you want but basically what you would do is you would average the island scale which to make sure the resolution is like everything's even here and then you would go to pack islands and it does an okay job but compared to what UV pack Master is going to give you it's night and day so basically go here to Advanced options tick on normalize Islands that's just the same as the average Island scale and I turn on heuristic and I just enable the search time to five seconds so when I click pack it's just gonna spend five seconds looking for the best possible packing result that I can find and what I tell people is if you're at 0.7 or above you're pretty much in decent territory so basically I don't know if you saw that number but it was 0.754 which means 75.4 percent of this UV square is being occupied anything above 0.8 is generally going to be a very good result if you can go above 0.9 you're um you're gonna have a really clean pack in this case though this is a decent result this is going to give me a good resolution after doing this enough times I know it'll be clean and then you can start texturing this inside your software of choice I personally use substance painter now I'll throw an image of this textured on the screen I'm not sure if I'm going to upload the texturing workflow I did I did record this but it was for our coaching and Community people so and that's closed by the way so I still don't know if I'm going to upload that to YouTube or not I might we'll see but um that's the final result if you want to see what the texturing looks like and um that's how you can you know unwrap your model and get a result like that it starts with UVS and clean unwraps so that's it guys I hope the video helped and if it did just leave me a comment let me know what you thought if there's anything that didn't make sense feel free to ask me and like I said there is a free UV unwrapping PDF you can grab on our site if you want something a bit more digestible that you can reference whenever you're doing your unwrapping so I'll link that in the description anyways thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 34,658

Keywords: blender unwrapping tutorial, uv unwrapping, uv unwrapping blender, unwrapping tutorial, uv unwrapping tutorial, blender game assets, blender tutorial, blender hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling blender, hard surface modeling tutorial, 3d modeling, blender beginner, blender unwrapping, substance painter, blender texturing, game asset texturing, uvs, unwrapping, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui, blender bros

Id: xFvW6kfClg0

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 29 2022