UV Map Anything in 5 Minutes with Maya

hey everyone today we're going to learn how to unwrap almost any model in 5 minutes in maya unwrapping uvs just means taking the surface of a 3d object and converting it to a 2d coordinate system as you can see here so you can see that the cube is a six-sided three-dimensional object and you're taking each side and translating it to a 2d coordinate system which in this case are uvs now i will break down unwrapping uvs to five key steps that will allow you to unwrap most models you create this is what i use professionally and personally to unwrap nearly ninety percent of my models so with that let's get started all right so here we are in maya right now we just finished modeling our character and we want to get into creating uvs for texturing so what i'm going to do is just go ahead and essentially just hide these groups that i don't need and i'm going to be focusing first on this hammer so let's go ahead to the top where it says uv open up uv editor so you can see you're going to get the uv editor window which is the uv coordinate system and then the uv toolkit i typically keep these things together these panels together so i'm going to left click and attach that right to my uv editor then for the sake of demonstration i'm just going to go ahead and dock that right here on the viewport give myself a little bit more room and we can go ahead and start so the five key steps are as follows create a blank slate of uvs select your seams cut your seams unfold and then lay them out so the first thing we're going to do is create a blank slate what i typically do is go to edit delete and what that does is simply delete any uvs maybe you had a messy uvs and a messy object and right now this just gives us a clean slate then what i'm going to do as you can see is select the object go to create and then just do camera based and that will generate new uvs which is exactly what we want in this case camera camera based works fine because that will give us all of these uvs combined as one object then comes the next step which is selecting the seams so i'm going to hit ctrl 1 in 3d and then i'm going to select my seams so your seams are going to be kind of natural places where you want the materials or textures to be different let's say it's one combined object and there aren't natural seams well you're going to do the best that you can to hide them now visible seams on the objects aren't a big deal anymore especially with texture painting so but we at least want to minimize it the best that we can so what i want to do now is select this edge loop so i'm actually going to select the furthest edge loop back i'm going to go to our uv editor and you can see i have cut and so unfold arrange and layout so i'm going to kind of expand those out and i'm going to simply hit cut now if i hold right click switch to uv you can see now if i double click i've essentially created a seam which separates these two objects into two separate shells now that i have two separate shells i can select the cap of our hammer go down to unfold and select unfold and there you go so we're essentially going to use that to unwrap the rest of the hammer so that means i can go back to the other side of the hammer double click this edge cut the uv select the uv shell i can separate them like this bring it down and then unfold and then now we have the rest of the hammer now for the rest of the hammer what i can do is i can go over here down at the bottom double click this edge that i just want to run all the way underneath the hammer and then what i can do is hold ctrl and left click marquee select to deselect the edges that are on my hammer caps here okay then once i do that now you can absolutely use these tools but to speed up your workflow i like using shift right click cut and once i cut double click that shell unfold and there you go and now if we take a look at our uvs you can use this to look at the uvs in 3d you can see we have nice clean squares if we didn't if they were maybe scale too high or too skewed or something like that that is a real problem but since we use unfold no matter what we do to these these uvs it'll always come back to a nice even distribution so now i can just use that workflow on the rest of the hammer and if i wanted to i can go back and maybe select the handle of the hammer ctrl 1 to isolate that and press one on the keyboard to exit smooth preview just in case you have smooth preview and then go to create so you can see the uvs here i should delete uvs create camera based oops by selecting the object or right click select object create camera based and then now what i can do is just like the hammer i can slice off these caps here and same thing here towards the bottom maybe i'll do it right up until here so i can keep this kind of maybe as a separate material when i'm texturing hold shift right click cut then what i can do is add that seam to split this hammer so we can see looking at it from the front here this is the front so i'd want to maybe add the seam running behind okay so i can double click this edge so it'll select this running up and down then i can sel control left click deselect it where i don't want those edges roll left click control left click ctrl right click cut i've split that in half or added that seam hold right click to switch to uv mode select your uvs unfold and there you go now we have multiple objects here and we can go ahead now and that last step you may be wondering about is i can select the hammer handle and the hammer cap and then use layout so i go down a layout and you can see it automatically packs it alright and that is the key techniques that i use to unwrap all of my assets so what i'm going to do now is just use that same workflow to unwrap the rest of the assets so that was the five minutes uh and you can continue to do that over all the assets that you have in your scene so i'll capture that at it in the video and i'll go into further detail in the next video so if you guys appreciated that uh i always appreciate a like comment and subscribe down at the bottom and let me know if you got any questions hopefully this was helpful all right thanks everyone take care you

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 44,507

Rating: 4.9708357 out of 5

Keywords: maya, 3d art, autodesk, tutorial, unwrap, unwrapping, UVs, UVW, UV Mapping, UV Map, how to

Id: t5Co6SuzoQw

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020