UV Mapping Characters - Free Chapter

hey guys having him working here from flip Knowles in this video we are showing you a free chapter from our newly released UV mapping tutorial or we cover how to use map the full character we go through all the steps from the first cuts to the final layouts we're also covering a lot of the fundamentals as well like wine do you actually do the layouts yeah this isn't just a step-by-step how-to UV map character because that exists for free everywhere on our channel yes I'm going to take that out but it's more the kind of techniques you would use in in a production whether it's for games or it's for VFX commercials whatever it is this is going to teach you the basics and the fundamentals so that you could sort of repeat those steps again and again yeah we're also covering them we have a checklist as well where the UV principles which you should follow and every single character you're doing until you learn how to break them which you can then do which we also do in widget area which you also do so it's just an overall it's just an overall series which will teach you basically production principles on how to do it as well it's finishes off with super quick and dirty way as well mm-hmm just everything goes off the rails and you need to just quickly get something out so yeah sit back relax and enjoy this first free chapter we're just going to be covering how to do scene cuts and all the technical stuff we're going to be covering more more the principles of even mapping whatever software you were using this is gonna be applicable if you're in mode of blender or Maya that that's basically irrelevant yeah and you can find tutorials on YouTube that are free on how to cut up but this is more to give you guys an overview of a production workflow best practices so you you know your UVs are up to scratch basically yeah like with a lot of our tutorials were gonna be talking more but why you do something as opposed to just what to do so in this chapter specifically we are going to be covering some of those conventions we have a UV mapping checklist this this comes along in your in your directory which you can just find under content so we just gonna covering some of these in in this video we're gonna show you some Mari some in and some in my like I said it doesn't really matter which one doesn't really matter which packet you're using we just gonna be sticking it to we're gonna see him to Maya but it really doesn't matter so the first thing we are really gonna be talking about is are you optimizing by your optimizing your layout for humans or for computers this this might sound a bit weird but because likely it basically means are you optimizing the space for in the UV editor here for for a quick rendering or are you optimizing for quick text or painting this layout here is a good example of a quick texture painting everything is a nice a symmetrical everything has a subtext of density it just meaning the scales are to see exactly the same ratio you can see that in the viewport nothing is bigger than other things every yeah everything is perfectly symmetrical and we have a center line going through everything this makes it very easy to paint it's a very logical layout which means you know you can probably look at this layout and see what stuff is this is most likely arm most like leg the ears are right here the torso and in the back there is no real ambiguity makes it very quick for actual texture painting but you can see it's terrible for for actual optimization yeah we're lacking a lot there's a lot of empty space that could be utilized and for a production whether it's if it's in commercials or visual effects then this will probably be fine you know we it's not how many um you use and how you optimize them isn't always as important but for games that would be a different matter but you would want to utilize every piece of useful every pixel in there I do want to optimize that you don't want to use younam's so for this for games would be absolutely terrible or you'll be fired you'll be fired day one but it looks so nice yeah you be you be gone confused but the effects and if a person particularly doing it's not necessarily so much optimizing the render times because you know you're doing one frame and that frame has to be rendered once yeah but in games you're talking about 60fps yeah so it's it's so important that stuff is optimized there yeah and also when you're talking about games everything counts if the amount of cuts that you have count like you want on something like the face you we have a we have a base mesh that made by Vincent Vincent mania from CCP games and we talked to him about his base mesh and how he laid out the UVs and he really emphasized like one cut and you just want one cut or two cuts or whatever as few cuts as possible because every cut adds another there's another part that needs to be computed so you just want to optimize it as much as possible where's this we're optimizing it for less stretching and making it easier to paint areas exactly it's like if you if you have a good layout this is something a lot of people don't really know if you have a good layer you can optimize texturing process maybe by twice I work with layers before bridge they've been robbing texture artist and I didn't really have much say in the layout it was already the user already done and it was a real pinning us to actually texture yeah because I stuff the stuff just wasn't laid out in a convenient way but when I've done my own textures I can literally paint twice as fast just because of its optimized elf's optimize for me so in that case I would rather have paint Maps twice as fast then to shave off like 30 seconds on a render mhm so we're gonna be covering more of that later on as well we're showing some examples in Mari just the difference between the two and but we just can move on now to some of some of the other checklists so one of them is no overlaps this means that you don't want let's say you have the ear like this you don't want this to overlap like so or just have a little bit overlapping this this is something you often see where you just have a little bit of overlapping we're going to show you some Mari why this is problematic yeah and you can even have that within the islands themselves like if you're if you UVs aren't unfolded properly they can sort of like unfold in on themselves sometimes so that's also something to keep an eye on like force yeah yeah yeah though that said you can do overlaps if it's deliberate yeah we have an example with some teeth we're going to show you in more in a bit also another one is nothing should ever go outside the UV tile this is called them we're gonna be covering this in a different chapter do you Tim layout but basically one of these tiles can be called eye Yudin so basically nothing should outside the udimm we just means like if you have something very close to the edge and you're talking like this this is very problematic yep so you you probably aren't going to be talking about so much in these directions but you probably have something close to the layout where you have like a little one so I've seen this where you have literally one X okay and one fix was gonna screw up Mauri is gonna go whoa or whatever it is you're painting in doesn't really matter and sometimes it could be quite hard to spot so if you get in the habit of not having UVs be too close to the Union borders that's not a problem you're really gonna run into yeah but keep it in mind and this also means as well don't place it right here yeah exactly like don't place it too close because this is the same way the another one which is don't keep them too close to each other so don't keep them like this you can optimize some stuff you really really have to optimize it but let's say you have to blur the textures now you need a little bleed around it so if you blur this this island it's going to bleed over to this one so um also it's really hard to select stuff as well if you need to make masks in Photoshop or whatever it is it's really hard to actually do that and then you need everything to be in the same tech with the Taysom Texel density it just means everything has the same scale currently you can see how the head has the same scale as the body it just means the little little squares most of the same size hmm this this means that whenever you tiling something across or if you're painting something everything is a similar solution if we were to do this you can see now the resolution is completely different and this is this is quite problematic unless you know what you're doing yeah that might be there might be cases where you will definitely need this you know where you know you have a close-up shot and your character is wearing clothes but the hands are visible you know you could feasibly have the head be twice the size in terms of the Texel density and then have be have the hands below us for example if you know you're you weren't gonna see those as close up absolutely that that's definitely an option yeah next next one is keep the orientation of the scales the same this is gonna become clear once we're looking Lauren we've looked in the front you know everything is kind of the grid every is kind of the same it kind of flows into each other yeah so this is one of these where you're like yeah of course of course it should be that way and we've been teaching recently worried where we had this debate should we show the efficient way of doing it which took us years to figure out or should we just let the students do their thing and when we're showing this layout we're just like we were just presenting this final distilled water and we're just like check this out the brilliance and this peers are like alright yeah that makes sense that bigs total sense yeah but it only makes sense because we told ya you don't get it so this is another one of those where do you optimize for computers who do you optimize for people yes so having a having a UDS laid out in the same direction it's definitely more optimized for humans yes for humans for people like it also weird when your text you're painting because it just makes a texture artists life a lot easier if things flow in the same direction this is very problematic if stuff is like this some is upside down some is like this the leg is yet away this is something I used to do a lot before I used to optimize the crap out of it but this this here is might give you issues you know technically it's not like it's not gonna fail in this and checks it's not gonna render slow or fast or anything if this is like this or this is like that it's exactly from the computer point of view it doesn't care yeah but from a human point of view it matters that humans it sounds a bit weird right talking about the human smug has certain species butter well is what is next one is keep it logical this is kind of wheeler too in the beginning about it just needs to make sense like the way it lays out the ears are up here the torso is here the arms here and here if you were to do the opposite where you were to do you were to move the arm and foot around now this is no longer logical because now you're selecting this and you like on that yeah this is left the foot and it's just it's just really annoying particularly if you aren't doing the text tree if you're just doing the layout and you give this to texture artists it's gonna be it might not even realize this until a few days afterwards and then it's gonna come with a baseball bat very very uncomfortable to are annoying to paint with us but um so this is obviously where it was just swamped putting hub layouts where they just don't make sense at all they're just a huge mess and that's that's very annoying yeah next one is you want to make sure your your maps are symmetrical this just means you could paint one side and it's flip it over this is where one of the examples off you can speed up your texturing so much if you're doing something like a substance then you have real painting or real symmetry painting but even so it's still an advantage just to keep it symmetrical just because you can now if you have to paint something in Photoshop super easy if you want to paint in Mari or whatever even if you're using your dis for rigging or whatnot because you can also use through UV sets for rigging yeah now you can look very quickly as a mirror from left to right and this is something people don't really talk about is test your map before start texturing if you if you're done with the map now you don't just go and export it and then and then just start painting you know bringing it to Mari bring the painter and test it out spend like 20 minutes on it just try something out and now you would realize that oh crap this wouldn't work so now you gotta bring this back to this point so I'm a optimize my layouts a lot it's kind of like the first that when you do your UV sets the first pass of the eby's it didn't get some feedback on it maybe the hand shouldn't be like that you figure out a reason why that's not optimal you want to be like that and it's a lot cheaper to spend 20 minutes in a beginning optimizing it there than there is to realize that after you've off your actual start texture and every time you go through production you you go through these exact same things you were like we should we should really do this at the early stage and some super eyes it goes like just we just need to finish it yeah like you sure this we're definitely cut no no no just keep going and then six months later the gallic we have we need to change it uh now now we need to take okay let me just spend a month now because now everyone needs to be updated it's a real peninnah stuff that you these maybe not so much you can always reproject it back and forth but the the reproduction of Marius tutorials are broken and it's just annoying you shouldn't have to do it if you use change then no textures can change rigging might have to change you know there's a lot of things that it's really enough to change so the last point on this list is use you dance as selection sets and I like what the hell does that mean so this is we are gonna be covering you tips later on but the udimm is basically what now you have you have the body in one YouTube and now you have the lake in another you wouldn't do it like this but um this is an example so now you um you have one separate map for the like this means that in Mara now you can just select this Eden and the leg is selected this is again one of these yeah that's logical yeah because we told you this is some more this is another example what people do they they have like a hand or maybe they have an ear they're optimizing for this just texture space and now they have all sorts of random stuff in it where you know you have you're just doing like someone this so now you when you select a unit Mari you have this we just have a bunch of random stuff selected which yeah it might be better for texture for texture space but it's terrible for texture painting yeah and you tips are used for so many things if you need to split up your character in ZBrush later on then you can take your you can split up based on YouTube at least if you've done it correctly if you were to split it up based on this unit now you would see something like this where this is what you would split up so the the foot the right foot would be connected to the top of the left hand optimal but if you only have this now this makes sense this this is you can totally work with this yeah so that's basically our checklist let's look at some more practical examples of this in Mari so we're going to look at a few different ones here we have we have a layout that's going to and we aren't going to be painting anything at all in Mari in this video they're not purely this is the only chapter we're gonna be using Maureen's pure just show you what we mean so let's look at the bad layout and let's look at a good layout and look they're just slightly optimized one this is a terrible layout let's bring back some wireframe so you can see what's going on and let's just say all the time so this is what the this is what he layout here looks like this is something I've seen this in production for students with everything is just messy this display out here makes no sense whatsoever let's say you have to paint something here in in 2d and you need to find the face like oh man where is the face oh cool the face is here and now if you want to paint like a straight line across it ya shirt and do that because it's the face but what if it's like it's like the thigh or something you don't know which one of these is the thigh is this defy me B oh and I'm painting from top I'm painting top to bottom and it goes from bottom to top very messy is this the front or the back well that was the back it's maybe this is the front and now I'm painting from top to bottom Meneses go from bottom to top it's physicists a huge huge mess so if you if you were given someone this obviously you can't today whoever made this should be fired yeah and then we have some of this which is nice a little over laughing so let's let's see what happens here we're painting on this and now we're just painting on one side and a go it pains at the same time here as it does on the hand so this is this is impossible to work with a lot of times you you might have this where you just have subtle overlaps you're not really sure what's going on but you maybe you're painting I should have better to show you three you're painting like here on the back of the back of them of the arm and then suddenly it's showing up here infuriating and it just shows up everywhere Conte that's contact overlaps at all so we have the same thing here can't have overlaps terrible stuff then also um if we use a tiled tiles are used all the time when in texture painting just because you can very quickly get a quick result out of it we just have a table map which is nothing special and just tiled a few times across it this is a huge mess it looks a bit cool it looks a little random and nice but that's not the desired effect no we don't want random akule we want we want predictable so let's compare this to the good layout I can see here this is this makes sense now the layout here everything goes from top to bottom and it follows the shape of this it's now it's now I'm predictable what this is going to do if you have something like this now you can use wood one tile you can get coverage of the entire thing yeah we worked on a movie called a monster called smear score I did modeling and the texture art is specifically requested and the layer that you've allowed to be like this because she just had a - she just had a tile like this and did basically the same thing huge tree monster bark texture just do one tile and you get coverage obviously there are still issues with it but you can fix the C's and you can work with that so this is really really really why you want the direction to be the same let's just go back to the other one - bad land and now this is this is messy as hell the way you would fix this would be if you if you had this layout let's see one the torso to be straight up and down you go and rotate it until it's straight up and down and then you would mask it out and then you do the same for the thigh and for the hand and everything any word is mask it out so you would have like 15 tiles and if you're changing everything it's it's messy as hell you can see how this would speed up your workflow if if you have a UV layout where the direction is the same everywhere it's a texture artist has just come in throw on a tileable and then you know 80% of the work is done yeah you know it's it's just gonna speed up their work so much more and it doesn't cost you as a modeler much to do that it's just you know just rotate it make sure everything kind of makes sense in terms of the direction and you'll make everyone's lives easier yeah yeah absolutely whenever I've been texturing I I've always just based off tiles because it's you can get so you can get so far so quickly yeah and a lot of times as well you obviously these seams are a bit extreme we also deliberately chose a texture which had create similar directionality into it like like this but if you have a text which doesn't have that much directionality you can get very very far use with miles so this is this is why I'm so adamant about about some of these rules because tie levels are the kinguin new texture another one here is that you can see the the texture density is crazy like the the head is tiny so now there is no that there is a lot less resolution here and you have something like the hand just look bigger you see how sharp and crisp is this and go to the head and it's just you it's just a huge mess but if you go to the good layout again now you can see everything else basically same size everything goes up and down it's symmetrical it's nice the hand is the same size you could easily blend the hand into into the arm next one while in the bad one you can't but you literally can't blend these two together you it will be so painful so two of the most important ones when it comes to when it comes to texture painting is keep the texture density to sing and keep the orientation exactly the same so that took me years to truly learn yeah and there will be places like the connection of the arm is always going to be strange because you basically have a cylinder that it's extruded out from the body and the direction just will change there but then at least you can keep the direction the same going down the arm and into the hand and then you will have to do some fixing up between the body and the arm but you know those are small things to fix compared to the entire body yeah exactly we also have overlapping let's look at that we have some teeth here overlap there we go okay cool so here there so this is something that you can do if you if you want to really optimize for for maybe for games or something you can you can overlap them this just means that if you you can paint one tooth and all the other teeth will get the texture it's a super cool it's kind of like a it looks kinda like a super asymmetry we're now you they all have the same one and for a lot of in lot of cases this this would work for reef X you would never do this because then you need precision we need like you need one tooth to be unique but if you need something quick this is a great way of doing it but just be aware of the consequence of it that means if somebody's like hey can you make this tooth here a bit a bit different you're like yeah cool now all the other ones have it as well so there it's a huge trade-off to having overlaps the advantage obviously it requires a lot less texture space yeah so if you you can you can just have one two one one eye whatever it is but massively problematic if you need control this in the other hand let's make any one now we have every single tooth has its own movies has his own unique UV space so now you can paint unique textures for all of them but obviously this has also looked slower to do because you've got to paint all of them but this has been laid out in a way in in mind so that you could take this into Photoshop you could you could just paint one of these and it could copy paste this onto the other ones there's nothing I've done with it in nuclear for actually it didn't have access to that or something a fusion or whatever is using where you you just paint one you lay after you them or ice or a layout which copies this texture onto the other ones because this is evenly spaced and very easy to reproduce yeah so now you just paint one bringing in two nuke and it just copies over automatically to the other ones and this means that you have you have the speed of only painting one but you have the flexibility of full control of everything well alternatively I guess you could have like you could do two layouts you do one which is the overlap for the teeth get that all on to all the teeth yeah and make a separate layout which is this layout and then you have full control afterwards you could totally that as well we just projected yeah exactly but with this layout here like any saying you can basically paint one tooth duplicate it over to the others so you still have the it's still accessible in the way that you can just speed up your workflow by painting one tooth but you can still customize every tooth if you need to yeah exactly it all goes back to like do you want to do one optimizer for computers or for humans yeah one one is one is better because he gives you control the other one is faster tener there's always trade-offs for it the first render goes the well the faster that texture painting goes there often trade-offs in terms of the actual speed for that so this this pretty much concludes chapter 1 where we've just covering all the conventions and the next ones we're going to be covering some actual tools now not to do it you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 38,979

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, creature, character, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, blender, flipped normals, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, learning ZBrush, 3ds max, cubebrush, cube brush, gumroad, marvelous designer, photoshop, mari, blender guru

Id: roNFY8G8KUM

Length: 24min 37sec (1477 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018