UV Mapping 101 in Maya 2014 Part 1

okay so when it comes to you being I know it can be a little difficult to wrap your brain around at first what UVs are and why we need to do them how they work and so on but basically it's a pretty simple concept you have a 3d object and you have to apply a 2d image to it in order to color it so the best can't be the best sort of metaphor that I can think about comparing you v's to is sort of like a sewing pattern so we have a sewing pattern and this is for something like a wedding gown or something but you have a you have to cut out a bunch of these two-dimensional shapes in order to sew it all together and make this thing that fits around a 3d object or a body so when it comes to think about thinking about you being it's sort of like the opposite of that you have a 3d object and you have to fit a 2d object to it so we have to cut up this 3d object and make it 2d in order to apply a 2d or two-dimensional texture or image to it so we have color and variation and and you know painting and little designs and so on so that's basically it you have a 3d object you cut it up and you create a 2d image that's going to fit around that 3d object sort of like clothing for a sewing pattern would so I'm going to talk about some things that I do while I am moving some tools and different approaches to you ving different things so first of all I'm just going to bring up the UV texture editor so you get you can get that either by going to your polygons menu clicking on this last button at the very end or going to your polygons menu set and going over to edit UVs and down here at the very bottom there's UV texture editor and that will bring this guy up so this is where we edit our UVs you could navigate in here pretty much like you navigate in any viewport so in just it's pretty self-explanatory as far as that goes I'm going to explain what a lot of these things are but for now I'm just going to at the moment I'm just going to skip to like this little group of buttons right here so the first one is this half half image or half face and that basically just turns on your texture map on or off so that can be very useful if you don't want to focus on the texture at the moment you just want to kind of concentrate on your UVs the next one down is a sort of puts your your image your texture back here at half opacity so it makes it a little easier to see what's going on with your UVs especially if you have a really white image so something that's going to be really blown out and might hurt your eyes that might be useful the next one right here will basically turn blurring off so by default our images are little blurred if i zoom way in to a spot that has some color variation like that you're going to see that it's very fuzzy right here it's kind of blurred so if I turn that on then we actually see all of the pixels individually so that can be useful if we want to line up really closely our UVs with our pixels if you have a very big image you can kind of slow down Maya a little bit but usually it doesn't really affect it that much so I like to keep it on the next little grouping of buttons here and again I'm not going to go over everything in detail just kind of the ones that I use a lot and that are pretty useful and you most of them you can just see what they do by clicking on them or hovering over them so there's this guy right here which basically just turns a grid on or off so I find the grid distracting sometimes especially when I'm when I have my UV set up and I'm just kind of moving around so after I kind of unwrap everything I'll turn my grid off grid can be useful sometimes to get things in straight lines but usually I like to keep that off the next one is snapping to pixel on our on or off so I talked about how you can turn your blurring off on your image in the background however if I grab my UV and I move it around you'll see that at the moment it's kind of like I have this little pixel here and at the moment that's like right in the middle of a pixel so it's not getting the entire pixel in that UV what you can do is turn on snap to pixel and then it'll actually snap to the corners of each pixel so this could be really useful for lining things up with pixels and then you have this toggle shaded UV display on so if I turn that on all my UV shells or Islands so a shell or an island is basically a a group or a patch of UVs so all these individual pieces are referred to as a shell and Maya so if I turn that on all my shells will turn blue and that basically means they're all facing the right direction so if I were to grab one of these shells and flip it around and again I'll explain what a lot of these are over here but at the moment I'm just kind of working on these so if I flip that around it'll turn red so that basically means that this is no longer in the correct sort of orientation so if I write anything on this object if I have any text then if I look over here you'll see that now our little symbol that we had on the left and the scar was on on the right side of our character there now flipped so it's not always necessarily a bad thing depending it all depends on the type of model you know if it's for a game or film or if it's from a very low poly game that's not going to use normal Maps or so on like you can it's not always a bad thing to have flipped you v's but in most cases it is so that's basically what that guy is going to do it's going to tell you if you have your UVs oriented in the right direction and that can cause problems with unwrapping our UV stew which I'll explain later I'm just going to flip that guy back around and now that's basically it like that's sort of the some of the tools that I use to kind of toggle on and toggle off as I'm moving to kind of just help me UV the other tools over here will actually affect the way I move and pull and push UVs around so I want to talk about a few different ways to approach you being for a few different objects so first of all you have a few mapping options so how you would want to map your UVs and you could go in and sort of cut things up and move them around as you wish but kind of want to just talk about I guess the different approaches I take so the first thing that's very useful before you even get in to you being you can I use these buttons here but you can also just go to edit UVs and there's or create UVs planar mapping cylindrical mapping I'll talk about all of these but before I get into actually you Ving there is a little display option you can turn on and off that I think helps you quite a bit so if you go to display polygons texture border edges and turn that on you're going to see that a few of my edges here got a little thicker and if I you again you go to display polygons edge width you can increase the edge would of that object so let me go into shading and turn wireframe shader so it's also even when it's not selected you're going to see those thicker lines and basically what that means if I click on my object and I go to my UV texture editor you can see that it still has the UV layout that a cube was getting because I created this object here from a cube but that UV layout is going to have very thick lines around the edge and my model is going to have very thick lines in certain spots so basically wherever there's a border or edge of your UV patch you're gonna have a thick line so this is very useful for you to see sort of where your seam is going to be or where your island ends as you're texturing now you don't always have to have been this thick and I probably won't keep them that thick so I'll go to display polygons border edges let's try that again display polygons edge width and turn that down just a little bit I want it to be a little thicker but I don't want it to be so much so where whenever I'm you being you know it's going to be hard to see where things are so when it comes to you being a very geometric shape or a geometric model you know this one has a bunch of 90-degree angles I generally start out by using a automatic map and basically what an automatic automatic map will do is use planes in order to try to map this out on the best way possible so just click automatic map and you'll pretty much see what that does it's going to go ahead and map everything out into a very geometric shape and in this case it actually fills out our UV space pretty good keep that up there so whenever we create that automatic map I didn't really go into the options but all those options are still going to be there in our history so our channel box so if I go to my object and I click on poly auto projection that's my automatic map node or chunk of history that was sort of created so we can either edit settings here in our channel box or go to the attribute editor and we're going to find it there - poly auto projection and so basically Maya throws up all these planes and it's going to search for the closest polygon to it this is also going to have the closest angle to that specific plane so this plane here is going to be mapped to this plane and so on over here on options we can choose some some different things so I like to keep my automatic projections at 6:00 if you switch them to something like 5:00 you know things start looking a little odd 3 & 3 usually looks about the same as 6 but I like to use 6 because sometimes if you use 3 you'll get a bunch of flipped faces in here so I like to use 6 you have less distorted distorted in our cases I'm making it much of a difference into a square so it's going to try and fit all those UV patches into one square you have overlap that's going to just put them all right on top of each other you have a long UV which is going to put them in a nice little line and tile I like to just use into square so that's basically it as far as an automatic mapping goes now once you have your automatic map and this is something you would use again for a very geometric object anything non organic like a vehicle or a house or something into some sort of building I would use automatic mapping first and then kind of go from there so once we have our automatic map we can kind of go in I like to pull all of my UVs to the side so you're going to see me using marking menus a lot especially while I'm moving so if you just right click and hold down you can you know go to vertex edge UV face and you also have polygons here where this is where you're going to cut and sew all of your UVs and then if you hold down control right click this is where you're going to convert your selections so sometimes what you're going to see me do a lot is just select one UV and then hold down ctrl and right click and go to shell and what that's going to do is convert my entire my selection I have to select the entire shell that'll kind of make a little more sense as we move forward but that's basically what that does so then they kind of start sewing these things up so I don't have so many UV seams I can just go in and select an edge right click polygons move in so UV edge that's going to move and so those two guys together yep they are it's always going to so the smaller one - the bigger one in this case they're the same size so you know it didn't exactly do what I wanted so go to edge select an edge right-click polygons moving so again kind of jump that to where I didn't want it but you you sort of get the point and so that's not relevant really where I want it to so it I kind of want all of these guys fitting in one square so a lot of times what you can do if you want to know where your edges are connected you can either look in your 3d view so if i zoom in here and I select an edge we can see which edge we have selected there so against moving so things up if you want to cut open a piece or cut apart a piece you can just select an edge right click and go to cut UV edges and again that's going to kind of disconnect it or cut it apart from our selection there so I like this method for very geometric shapes very non organic shapes with a lot of sharp angles just because I think it works really nicely and usually whenever you do your automatic map you can kind of get a sense of what everything is so that's the method I like for the really geometric shapes not really a lot of use for using a lot of these unfolding tools you just kind of sew everything kind of cut everything apart and then sew everything back together and the orientation you want it so next let's look at and I'll go in a little more depth how I would actually set up an entire UV space for an object like this later on but next let's talk about how I would approach something a little more organic so if you have something like this something that is pretty organic a lot of curves round shapes and so on you can use the method I just use so let me turn my shade it back on so if you want you can use that method there's nothing wrong with that so if I go to text your editor you'll see that right now our movies are just kind of nuts and they're read because we have our toggle UV thing on and it's just saying these are all overlapped and they're just crazy at the moment so again the first thing I would do is go to display polygons and texture border edges so we're going to see a bunch of those all of us all over the place where we have thicker lines in areas because that's where our seams are so if I go up and do an automatic map so create UVs automatic map it's going to be a little better we're actually going to kind of make out be able to make out what everything is here but it's going to kind of put a lot of seams in places where we don't want them and it's kind of cutting up things and kind of orienting them we just don't have a lot of control over it and even though we can kind of tell what things are it's a little difficult or it's just going to be a lot more work too so all these little tiny pieces together and figure out where they belong so let me talk about real quick what the other mapping options do so if we go back to polygons see that we have planar mapping so if I do a planar map sometimes it doesn't want to want you to do an automatic map first because of history probably so if you do a planar map basically it's its mapping your entire object to one plane which can be useful because then you're going to see that you're not going to have any seams anywhere the only seam I have here is that the very bottom where there is no more polygons so that can be useful and sometimes I use that and if you click on its node so poly planar projection you have some some options here really the main one you're going to mess with is probably the nut rotation angle the rotate node so at the moment it's mapping it straight on so maybe I would actually prefer to have it mapped sort of it like an angle like this so what I could do is change Y to something like 90 degrees and and that's going to map it from the side rather than from the front and it's going to be skewed so I could probably go in and zero those guys out change my projection width make those the same value so if I just go in and make them like four and four we're going to get more of like a side view so I might actually use that to map to lay out the UVs for this guy but first let me talk about some of the other options so then you have a cylindrical map which is going to let me delete my history on this Y wants me to do an automatic map first but then you have a cylindrical map that's going to map that to a cylinder oops and we get a result like this and again you can rotate that cylinder around you have a little widget here in your 3d view where you can move that around and kind of edit that as you will and this is sometimes useful for automatic mapping ahead probably more useful to a human head because it's kind of round dogs sort of have the square shape so I might want to map it from the top rather than the the front or the side and then you have a spherical map which can also be useful for heads I'm just going to map it to a sphere so let me back up and I think I want to start with this planar map so the benefit of starting with something like a planar map or a cylindrical map is that we don't have any cut edges so it's kind of so imagine at this point if this is our clothing I talked about the piece of pattern like the sewing pattern before so imagine this is it when it's already sewed together on the pieces I've been cut out and sewed together and now I need to take that apart again so I need to cut those out again cut all those seams and lay it out on the pattern again so all right because I did a planar map and there's no seams here that means I can just put them wherever I want them at this point so I think the first thing I want to do is cut this guy in half just because I think that might be a little easier to deal with one half at a time so I can do that in two different ways I can either just select so I'm just double clicking the edge and getting that making sure that I get that middle selection all the way down and then I can go to right click go to polygons cut UV edges and you're going to see now that I have a thick line here now I should be able to go to UVs select one UV control right click and go to shell and move off half of the head so you're going to see ones blue and ones red that means that this one is in the wrong orientation so I will control right-click to shell and flip that so these will flip your movies so either flip it sort of on a vertical axis or a horizontal axis so that flips your UV shells so the other thing you can do if you have a completely symmetrical model like this to make life a little easier for you what you can do is just go in and delete half of it and then you can mirror the other half and connect it back up later so I'm just going to go to face flip half of those UVs delete them or half of the model delete it and then I only have to deal with half for now and then I can when I'm done sort of cutting this up and laying out the UVs then I can duplicate half over and Mira back over so at this point what I can do is figure out where I want my seems to be so you want them to be where they're not going to be readily visible you might want to hide them on a crease somewhere so maybe under under the jaw here make the seam and I'm just double-clicking and that will select that entire edge loop and that looks good I'm just going through and kind of figuring out where I want seemed to be and I might need to change this so after I make the initial cut I might want to change it - you might want to cut things up or sew them back together so let's make that a same let's it make that our first same and then we can probably go in and and just lay out that shell so I have the edge selected so I'll go back to my UV view right-click polygons cut UVs and again we're going to see a thick line there because now that's a texture border edge so I can right-click a UVs select a little group of UVs and then ctrl right click and go to shell and I can move that section away so now let's talk about some of our other tools up here and how useful they can be let's move our head down over here and scale them all bit and I'll move the little neck part over here so we have a few different things we have a UV lattice a smudge move UV shell tool usually and they have this shortest thing and a smooth Evie I don't use a lot of these to be honest the only one I really use I'll use the lattice every once in a while and I will use the smooth Evie's tool so if you want to figure out what these do feel free to kind of play around with them but I'm just going to talk about the lattice and the UV smooth smooth UV tool so first of all this works by whatever UVs you have selected so if I select one UV it's obviously not going to do much because it's just I just have that one UV selected I select multiple UVs it will only affect the UVs I have selected not the entire shell so usually in most cases you want to right click and go to UV shell control right click use shell so a lattice works pretty much the same way it does in your animation deformers so just click lattice and it will give you this sort of bounding box and you can move in it's almost like using the mesh warp tool in photo you have this mesh now that you can move and kind of manipulate your model a little bit so that's the UV lattice tool then I like to use the smoothy V tool so if I click that you get this little widget this says unfold and relax and you can click those crosshairs and do that wherever you want and basically this is going to try to unstretched an e stretched UVs you have so if you just click unfold click and drag it's going to try and unfold everything so they're no longer stretched out you can continue clicking that and that's usually going to give you a pretty good result now relax we'll ignore the 3d space of how big your polygons are and everything and try to get everything it'll try to make all these angles as I guess acute as possible so or obtuse as possible I think so try to make these angles as smooth as possible so if I go in and select relax it's going to try and do this weird thing with our model and I use relax sometimes without you to usually only just use it a little bit and then I'll use unfold again so another thing that's very important to point out is that our unfold tool doesn't like UV shells that aren't in the correct orientation so right now I have this guy kind of unfolded as far as it'll go if I flip it so if I just do that and then unfold it's going to freak out on me it's going to try and flip it back over to the right orientation so that's another way this sort of toggle UV color thing is important is if you do not have it oriented correctly and you try to use your unfold tool it's not going to work it's going to try and flip it back over so always make sure that your UVs are sort of oriented in the right direction the other thing to point out is that like once you're in one of these tools here you might have a trouble selecting or moving things around and that's just because you're still in the tool so right now I'm even though I'm in UV mode I you know I can't move anything I can't just grab juvies and move them it's still in this unfold tool so what I just need to do is hit the W key or come over here and hit like translate and then that's going to sort of put me back in a position to where I can move things around so that's that's something I would do for this entire model is just cut things up where I want to seems to be and unfold them and again I'll go into depth in the future on how I would layout something specifically like this let me talk about some of these other tools real quick though before I move on any further so we've already kind of discussed to flip you v-tool so if I select Evie's I can either flip them horizontally or vertically if you want to rotate them you can hit your iki just like you would rotate a model and rotate that around or you can rotate them to a fixed degree angle so this will rotate your object 45 degrees so if I click that it rotated that 45 degrees and I'll just kind of rotate it around in either direction 45 degrees so that's something I use a lot the other thing I use every once in a while not a lot but every once a while are these aligned you v's tool so basically what this will do if i select multiple group of you ease and I hit one of these buttons it's going to line those UVs to either the left most selected UV the right most selected UV topmost or bottom looks so something like this selection here if I hit this button it's going to line them with all of these UVs with this one UV like that didn't have that one selected so it's going to do something like that just make a straight line of those based off of that left most UV where the error arrow is pointed and then this will do the rightmost UV and the bottom most UV and the top most UV so that's a very useful set of tools so so that's pretty much how I'd go about you being something like that next we can look at something that's a more complicated shape so how would I UV something like this and all honesty I wouldn't this is a very difficult complicated shape trying to UV it would just be a big headache so if I look at the UVs this already has it's basically you vide like a cylinder is which could be okay unless you wanted to edit these in any way and it's just impossible at that point I could try doing something like an automatic map but then I'm going to get something that's just sort of impossible to work with cylindrical map again same thing sorry that's a spherical map cylindrical map and planar map are all going to give me stuff that's just really hard to work with for a model like this so the solution to that is kind of just knowing what you're doing as you're modeling thinking about you being something as you're modeling and realizing that this is going to be a difficult thing to UV so what you would want to do is UV it before you actually make it the shape you know so for an example would be like a piece of rope or a wire or maybe some pipes or something like that if you wanted to texture a rope texture to this you would probably want to think about you being and texturing it before you make it in this shape so you would make something like a cylinder which is going to UV a lot easier you know I just have a cylinder here so I could use something like a cylindrical map or even an automatic map and I'll get something you know mapped correctly and I can apply like a rope texture or something to that and then I could go in I could add a joint system and Bend that around or I could even use some deformers so I can go like to animation create deformers nonlinear use something like a twist the former and just hit create and what I can do is move that to form or off to the side and then I'll go into my channel box my inputs here and then I can twist that around I'm sort of get the shape I want out of that after I you've eat it after I have a texture on it it's going to make that look like a rope so when it comes to really complicated options or objects like this think about you ving them before you to form them to some crazy shape that's just going to be impossible to layout UVs for a lot of times you you'll just be modeling not thinking about it and you'll make a shape like this and go to UV it you realize it's just something that's impossible to UV so your only option at that point it's just to recreate it or create it in a smarter way which is fine you know it might take a little longer but after you already know how you want it shaped you can lay out the UVs for it and then deform it in some way it'll just make things a lot easier for you but you know when it comes to objects like this I don't even attempt laying out two UVs for them I just I would just recreate them lay out the UV recreate it and like a straight oriented object lay out the UVs and then deform it to look the way I want it to you

Channel: Glen Gramling

Views: 46,090

Keywords: UV Mapping, Maya UV Mapping 3D Tutorial Awesome Best Learn, Autodesk Maya (Software), 3D Modeling (Profession), Tutorial (Industry), 3D Film (Film Format), Best, Awesome, Learn, Maya, Texturing, Tutorial, Animation, UV, Mapping, Maya 2014, Glen Gramling

Id: v0OnijxbSMc

Length: 43min 13sec (2593 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 09 2014