UV Mapping Toolbox for Maya

hey this is Malcolm 341 in this video we're gonna look at a tool I created to speed up UV mapping UV mapping is painful at the best of times so let's check it out so first let's check out how I used to do UV mapping so basically what I would do is I would go to the UV menu here and I would go into the planer and I would select the options box here and then I would hold ctrl and shift to add a button for the shelf and left-click and so I would add this guy here and basically as I wanted to do different UV maps I'd click here and then I would set my options here so for example let's say I wanted to go a long said so we'd go Zed keep hit with height whatever bounding box yep cool and then I would hit apply and then you'd get a planar projection there and then you know forever I did some modeling need to do some more UV mapping ok I need to like map the top or whatever grab the top and then you know come back into this button again okay I want to go along Y this time okay great and then do that and so on and so forth and then what I found was I was coming back into this menu so often and switching these options I just found it really annoying the menus really big it gets in the way I kind of just want to quickly be able to access all of these different tick boxes because I use them quite a bit for different mapping methods and also what I found is so let's say I wanted to set the Texel density of this face that I just did there so I planar map it and then I have to come here into the channel box and I have to select these two and type my desired Texel density so in this case I want to do 400 and so each time I wanted to go and do a planar map like let's reapply that one to the front here I'd go to options I'd go along Zed and affect those options project it and then have to go back up here and type 400 each time or whatever my excellent desired Texel density was going to be and so I just thought that was really tedious so I wanted to come up with a tool to like automate that whole process as well there's a couple other mapping options that I like to use in here like I like to use automatic mapping for some stuff I like to use best plane I did do planar quite a bit I like to use my grid if I UV script so I just kind of wanted to put it all in one place so what I came up with was this guy here the ume mapper so you just click this button to launch it and then you get this little floating window and you can kind of put it wherever you want try to keep the window to a minimal size so it doesn't really get in the way so I can kind of just have it open while I'm working so what's really cool is it's got all of your mapping types at the top level here just visible all the time you got XYZ camera then you have best playing automatic gratifi you've ease your unfold your straighten and your Texel density stuff what you can do is you can press any one of these buttons so scrab this guy so we're gonna project one X so that's going to be there so you just go boom one click and you've got your X and there's your Y there's your Zed you see that's for camera mapping so there's your camera map what's really cool about this is that each one of these map types has these modifiers here and this modifier here so I'm going to show you what those do so remember we did the planar map and then we had to like go over here and like set the the Texel density or whatever so here at check this out this is super cool so I've built the Texel density directly into all of the map types here so if you're going to do a planar map along Z and you want the Texel density to be 400 you just click it and boom there's your perfect pixel density along 400 let's say that your Texel density is not 400 let's say it's 200 so you just change that number and hit enter to accept it and then all of these map types update with your new Texel density so if we go Zed again you get a different Texel density so that's all in world space so that's 200 units equals you know whatever the map type is and then that cool thing is is that it works for all these types so it's the cameras set to 200 Zed the Y the X all of the map types are all set to 200 and where this can be super helpful so here let's just go along Y there just top down so that makes sense here where this can be super helpful is when you're working on ground planes or walls you're going to want your taxol density to match up between your different ground planes that might be different models or whatever so the cool thing is is that it will work it'll work across multiple objects and be seamless with its Texel density so I'm just going to hide the oops it's going to hide the edges there so we can see it at the same time and then I'm going to go along why and I'm going to set my Texel density to 400 because that's the one that I like and boom totally seamless across both of the assets and they're not stacked or anything so they're in worldspace projected and you get your seamless Texel density across it so if you're doing a lot of ground terrain mapping for a game or something and like you know you're going to be modeling at the same time so let's say you're doing some modeling oh you you know you're making the ground plane like this or whatever and then it can be kind of a hassle to match all that stuff up later so you can just do your projection along Y and get a perfect Texel density seamless and it's all lined up in the UV editor as well so you don't have to go around and snap it back later on and now you might be asking well okay that's cool you know like the Texel density thing is awesome that's very useful in a lot of situations but sometimes I'm working on a prop or whatever and I just want to do a classic planar map like I could in the default my options box and so that's where these guys come in here so when you have this tick box turned on that's basically projection width height that's the stuff that's stored here in the channel box when you have that turned on it uses this value to set the Texel density when it does the projection so the cool thing is when you turn that guy off and you project along the same access or any access here we're going to go along Y it's going to project it into the 0 to 1 space because we've turned that off we have keep width height ratio turned on and so that'll give you the width height ratio because this is a rectangle mapped in the 0 to 1 range now if you turn both of these guys off this is going to ignore this and ignore this and we'll do the same map that are so along Y and it's going to project it into the 0 to 1 space without the width height range ratio turned on and so you get a 0 to 1 projection even though that's a rectangle so basically like I said I wanted to expose all these things I kind of do my mapping and then I set all these little tick boxes and like put all these little modifiers and stuff on it and I found it to just be too painful to keep going into the menu and switching all of that stuff so I mean now we can do really fast stuff like ok like Oh with height okay boom why done Oh what's this is little unsaid and like I want to do Texel density along Zed there's a few hundred sorry four hundred Texel density and then Alon X I don't want to do anything I want to just put it in the zero because one space and so there you go so super handy speeds up a lot of my mapping and then it's all in one place I don't have to have like all these weird buttons and stuff to grab other functions and things like that the next one down is the best plain tool so if you guys are not familiar with this basically what it does is it tries to project the planar map onto the best plane that it can find and so when this is useful is basically if you've got a surface and right now it's all right angle aligned so it's really easy you can project on top side or front but if you've got a surface like this that's like at a really bad angle and the transforms frozen let's say we project along X here so let's go along X and you'll see it's all skewed because X is basically not planar aligned with the world or whatever so the cool thing about this one is if you use the best plane tool instead of all these guys so it go best plane it will try to project it perfectly along that access even though that access is not aligned so see it actually put down a perfect one and then you might be wondering oh like I wanted it to be perfect like mapped in whatever that's cool we got you covered because that was to the Texel density but them you don't want Texel density maybe you wanted it to be perfectly aligned there so best plane there you go again keep the width height and if you don't want the keep with tight and just click it again and you get a planar map so pretty cool ok and then the next one is automatic which can be super helpful in a lot of situations so same thing these settings are again obeyed by the automatic so the most probably the most useful one with automatic is actually to set it to your exact pixel density because you can do a rough layout of your UV s at the exact pixel density that you want so my Texel density that I like to use is 400 so we'll just select it and click boom and there you go and so it's automatic map every faced from every access to exactly 400 so this is coal will set this to 200 and reapply the automatic map and you can see it's actually changing the scale of the checkers because it's changing the Texel density so it's a crazy Texel density really high res so that's super helpful as well so let's go back 400 that guy one more time and so again these modifiers again do the same thing so if you turn that guy off and you do the automatic you get this you got zero to one with the keep width height and if you turn that off and do the same thing it'll stretch it into the zero to one space which can be handy for certain situations and then I want to show you actually a kind of a bug that I fixed that you can't actually do through the Maya standard interface so this is pretty cool so now in Maya when they do their automatic map if you have scale on the object so let's say I'm going to scale that into a rectangle and I'm gonna go into UV and I'm gonna go into automatic and click it watch what happens when I automatically takes the scale into effect which is undesirable and see how these are all stretched so basically I found that like pretty annoying my wife actually asked me like why does the automatic map always project and go all wonky and I kind of looked into it and I found out that the scale is inherited and so when I created this button here it ignores the scale so here check this out so even though I have the scale on this when we project with my tool you get perfect squares and even if you scale it back down and you reproject again you get perfect squares so just a little improvement on the maya default behavior okay and next up I put the grid afire UV script I built it right into this script because I use the grid if I UV tool so much so if you haven't seen that before I have actually a whole video on it a few videos on how to use it or whatever but we'll just do a quick demo here so I'm just going to grab these faces and then click this magic button and it's going to put those into a perfect grid and then what I found is that was awesome super helpful then I was he's going into here and then I was like oh I'll unfold along ve and then I'll straighten V's and blah blah blah you bunch of crap in there and so what I found was useful as actually put the tools right here so basically I'm gonna you know grab these faces gratify them and then they're squished so I want them to be squares they're rectangles right now so I'm going to unfold along V and then boom you get the nice perfect squares but you might see oh they're like maybe they're a little like off or something you know sometimes you'll unfold and they'll be like a little bit of like warble in it or whatever so I also put in the straighten you and straighten V and straighten U and V so in this case I'll just straighten everything so straighten U and V but that Ron and boom and now everything's perfectly gratified and same with the unfold I put u V U and V so if you wanted to go you V unfold you get that if you wanted to go a long B you get that if you want to go along you you get that so plenty of different uses here but I just find that I use these tools so much in conjunction with the grid if I UV subscript that basically wanted to just build them all into one little quick little interface since I'm always kind of in this area for a lot of the UV mapping and I also built the standard straight in UV shell tool which basically is right here this thing here it's coming useful in certain situations to map kind of curvy shapes or like roads or something so basically you select an edge and then you click the shell button and that'll try to give you kind of the best straight thing and then from there you could in theory click this guy the straighten tool I didn't quite get it there so it just kind of depends on how you want to do your UV mapping a lot of the guys at work use this so I put it in there as well and then finally if you don't want to do a projection and actually set the Texel density and project at that time but you want to come back to something that you've already projected and then copy paste the Texel density that's what these guys do here get that Texel density and set pixel density so let's say this little guy here I like the Texel density of this you basically just grab a face and you go get and then on this guy here you can just click set and it'll the last selected one will be stored in memory so you can actually come up here and you can just go set again and so you can go set set set set set set set or whatever you wanted to get some crazy small Texel density again you can just grab it from there and go on there and set it so that can be helpful as well because normally the get and set Texel density is so buried down in this thing in here or I don't know I could never remember where it is this thing's pretty disgusting so I try not to use it so I came up with this little clean guy that kind of has all the stuff that I care about to do UV mapping I don't really need any other stuff that often or if at all so that was a quick demo of what all the different tools do in here so let's put it to practice let's map this kind of weird shape that I have here and see how the tool can help us okay so first I'm just going to go into you v's and just get those out of the way so they're not in the zero one space and then I'm gonna go into face mode and I'm just gonna grow my selection to there let's say so let's just do a planar map along Y so boom there we got one cool like I done let's go to the bottom same thing go there t-there same thing planar map along Y then switch into UV mode and just go unfold U and V just to get rid of that overlap unfold U and V to get rid of that overlap cool so those guys are mapped so one thing that I find saves a ton of time when I'm UV mapping is I'll actually separate parts of the model into separate objects because it's easier to select things like it's gonna be kind of painful to select this stuff so I'll show you what I mean so I've got those part map and I'm gonna grab that and then I'm gonna invert my selection you just have to convert back to faces here for whatever reason and then I've got a button for a combined and separate so we're just going to use those hotkeys so I'm just going to separate and the reason that I did that is so I can get quick selection so that parts map so we're done with that so basically I want to grab all of this and same thing I'm going to separate that guy out okay great and so now we're ready to map this so this one's going to be really easy because it's a cylinder what we can do is I'm just going to isolate the selection here and then I'm going to select some edges as the border edge to cut along and then sorry I'm going to go into multimode and also select some faces at the same time and do the gratify you bees boom you get that in one click and then it looks like what are we unfold you yeah unfold you and then I'm just gonna rotate that guy there let's rotate two more times okay cool so we've got the base of it map there isolate selection again so we got these two guys done and now another trick that's really good is if you can in UV mapping don't bother mapping things that are exactly the same so see how I've got all these repeated elements here I'm just gonna map one and then it'll be way easier to just redo placate the asset over and over again to get that mapped on all the other ones so here I'm just gonna select these guys here got all those selected and I'll hit delete and then I'm gonna select the faces on this guy and I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna do a separate so that's its own separate object again for this guy let's try here let me just isolate selection again that's this little button up there I just have a hotkey for it so for this guy let's try just grabbing these faces here and let's gratify those and then let's unfold along V great and so we got that guy let's just straighten the UV shell just in case there's a little bit of warble and then for these side bits I think we could just put a planar map through them yeah planar map along x so boom get those guys there and then I'll just get this UV show for these guys I will just do a stitch together and my stitch together is always smallest to largest so that means these small ones going to go to the large so stitch together and stitch together it doesn't rotate it that's weird just flip those guys there we go and go stitch to get it stitched together there we go cool so we got that guy Yumi mapped and I'm just gonna isolate selection again and like I was saying earlier now that we've got this guy mapped all we need to do is I'm gonna go duplicate the asset and rotate I'm gonna hold down J on the keyboard to snap rotate to 45 degrees and then I'm gonna press Shift + D to smart duplicate art sort of duplicate with transform and I'll get that 45 degrees each time shift shift shift shift shift okay and so like I said before the reason that I deleted all the other ones is because it's way faster for me to just you be map that one and then duplicated around so I've got perfect UV mapping on all of them without having to waste any time on it that is a trick I learned from a guy I need for speed so thanks to the need for speed team working with them I learned some pretty cool stuff and then the next thing here okay same thing got when we need to do one of these so I'm just gonna separate that into its own object isolate selection on it oh and this is cool too we can use the grid of Phi script on this as well so let's just go into multimode and pick an edge here and let's put another texture seam here and then select all of the faces and click the magic button and get that great and then what's direction is that going to be along you I think let's try it unfold along you yep cool and then straighten just in case there's a little bit of warble isolate selection back out and we're pretty close to being done here so I'm gonna grab all of these guys and so they're all me map it's not that guy and I'm gonna do a combined combined that back into one object and then again because I've already Yumi mapped it I'll just duplicate it down here and snap it along this guy let's say go snap to fit right there isolate oops or is it isolate selection on this guy yep and delete and combine this this this this this combine all of this here and just do a weld vertices with a really tiny tolerance just welds everything back together that was separated when I separated the UV shells say okay to that if you haven't done so already I would go into modify and then go down to layouts go to the options box turn on unfold 3d pack resolution CH or 2048 preserve 3d ratios on translate shells 2048 8 pixels of padding and 8 pixels of padding distribute into a full square and hit layout and you will get that and then once you've set that one so I'm just going to undo it once you've set that once then you can come in here and you can press control L on the keyboard to just layout so this can be handy as well as you're unwrapping stuff just to get it all laid up so this is a terrible layout it's awful like some of these should probably be stacked on top of themselves or whatever but that's basically just how quickly you can get your UV mapping done and ready for your UV layout process by using the tool so pretty cool and then again if you've watched the Texel density video where we talked about hitting your average Texel density another thing that you could do is you could just come in here to make a plane quickly let's say I'm gonna say make a plane at 400 great so let's pretend that's my target Texel density and we could just do the get Texel density that's now set to 400 and on this guy here you could just do the set and boom that's actually the correct Texel density so now you must spend hours and hours of your life trying to figure out how to pack this into a zero to one space but keep that target Texel density or let's say that your Texel density was something higher let's say it was 200 200 loops few hundred and same thing you can do a get there and that'll store it forever and just do a set and then that's that and that'll be really hard to pack that into a single 2k texture probably impossible without it looking super repeated if you've already purchased the full script pack this will be a free update so you just need to download it again to get the new stuff if you haven't purchased the script pack yet you can grab the script by itself which also includes the grid if I UV script or you can get it in the full script pack so take your pick thanks for watching everybody without viewers like you this channel would not 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Channel: malcolm341

Views: 10,951

Keywords: Maya, autodesk, time, saving, tricks, secret, secrets, tips, 3d modeling, 3d modelling, easy, fast, tutorial, workflow, pipeline, best, mel, script, malcolm341, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, video, quick, free, beginner, learning, how, to, learn, polygon, polygons, hotkey, hot, key, use, save, uv, uvs, uvw, unfold, unwrap, unwrapping, mapping, map, untangle, planar, automatic, box, texturing, texture, unfolding, pelt, pelting, texel, density, pixel, smooth, relax, editor, gridify, toolbox, tool, floating, projection, width, height

Id: xWLcVflYANg

Length: 22min 51sec (1371 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 16 2018