UV Unwrapping Blender Tutorial

now that the retopo process of this character is finished the next thing you need to do before texturing the model is to unwrap the uvs uv unwrapping doesn't have to be a complicated process as you'll see later on it's just essentially a matter of marking the seams prior to using the unwrap command all right now that i have the retopo version of this character in the scene i would then switch the interface to uv editing by clicking the uv editing tab if the uv editing tab is not there just click on that plus icon to create a new one then go to general and then select uv editing this will create a new uv editing layout now that i'm in the uv editing layout i can now see both the 3d view in the uv editing window you can see that as i select the edges on uv editor it selects the corresponding edges of the model in the 3d view i'm now going to show you the core simple workflow of marking seams and unwrapping uvs alt-clicking an edge will select an entire edge loop if the model is symmetrical pressing shift-control-m will mirror the exact selection to the other side now if i press right click while edges are selected i can choose to mark that as seam by clicking mark seam after marking that scene the selection remains active so i can mirror that selection to the other side by pressing shift control m to mirror that selection i will do the same thing to the other side by right-clicking and selecting mark seam another way of selecting specific edge loop is by clicking an edge and ctrl-clicking the other edge to select a specific edge loop again shift-control-m to mirror the selection and then right-click and choose mark seam to clear the seams select the edges in the wireframe mode that allows you to select all the edges including those that are behind the model now that the edges are selected right-click and choose clear seams to clear all the seams since we are just looking at the 3d view we can restore the uv editing layout manually by click dragging one of those corners to create another window we can then click this icon and select uv editor to show that in this window there are instances when the model you import doesn't have any uvs to give it an initial set of uvs you can use any of these projection methods it really doesn't matter which one oh for this example i'm using the project from view i'm now going to fast forward from this point until i'm ready to unwrap the model since the steps i'm about to show are the same steps i already outlined a minute ago you can think of seams as cut lines from which the model will unwrap itself nowhere to properly place those seems to properly unfold the model also you can think of seams on your clothes from which if unfolded will look similar to uv islands in the uv editor alright now that the first set of seams are established i can now begin to unfold them in the 3d view if i select one of those faces and press l it will select those linked faces that are contained within those seams the selected linked faces will then be the uv islands if you right-click on the uv editor and select unwrap by this example you should now begin to see that uv unwrapping is essentially creating a flattened version of the model in the uv editor the flattened version of the model is organized into uv islands which are group of faces that have edge boundaries from here i can go to uv menu and choose pack islands this command will automatically place those islands within the zero to one uv space it will also pop out additional option on the lower left-hand corner of the screen which has a margin value margin allows you to indicate the spacing in between those islands while those islands are selected you can scale rotate and move them using the same hotkeys you use in the 3d view to manually reposition them in the uv editor now that's done i will now proceed and fast forward to other parts of the model you will see that i will just be doing the same simple steps i showed you early on placing seams and then right-clicking and choosing unwrap in the uv editor then scaling moving and rotating them for better placement sometimes if i see that seems i play star in the wrong place i'd simply right-click and clear those seams by choosing clear seams alright now that you know how to mark the seams and unfold them you should also know how to apply a checkered image texture on the model this is part of the uv editing workflow that lets you check the quality of the uv islands you unfolded to do that create a checkered image by clicking on this new button i'm going to name this uv checkered image the width and height should be fine as it is i'm going to disable the alpha and set the generated type to uv grid right after clicking the ok button blender creates the uv grid and is visible in the uv editor however if you enable the viewport shading mode you will see that the uv grid you just created is not yet applied on the model that said we need to connect the uv grid image texture to the model by going to the shading workspace in the shader editor press shift a and type image texture this will create an image texture node now connect its color to the base color of the principal vsdf then click that image drop down and choose the uv grid texture we created early on in the uv editor now if i go back to the uv editing workspace you'll see that the image texture is now applied on the model at first glance i can't seem to see enough number of squares to determine if those squares are stretching so i would need to adjust the scale of the texture image by going back to the shader editor in the shader editor i'd create a mapping node in a texture coordinate node by pressing ctrl t you need to enable the node wrangler add-on to make that hotkey work you can do that by going to edit preferences and click on the add-on button type in node in the search bar and enable the node wrangler add-on okay going back to the shader editor i'll increase the scale of the scale xyz in the mapping node to increase the number of squares now you see as soon as i increase that the number of squares increased as well after the previous step you can very well see the areas of the model where there's a lot of stretches especially on the face and on the side of the body this indicates that the texture maps you will apply to this model will stretch as well so i further need to unwrap the rest of the uvs the arms then the back of the neck have their uvs laid out correctly so the checkered pattern in those areas is looking great a few steps later i was able to unwrap the face from here you can also use average island scale what it does is it automatically adjusts the scale of the selected islands in accordance to their scale in the 3d space you can find that under the uv menu that may be something you can find quick and handy but for this creature i prefer to set the scale of the islands manually this is because there are parts of this creature that need to take more or less uv space depending on their visibility on the 3d view the eye sockets and the mouth bag uv islands are examples of these okay now i'm going to share a few more notes before i wrap up this video first is the uv sync selection if the uv sync selection is disabled you'll notice that no uv islands are shown in the uv editor until i select polygon faces in the 3d view if i deselect those faces then nothing also shows in the uv editor the advantage of having this turned off is the ability to select uv islands with one click if this button is enabled you'll notice that even if the components in the 3d view are deselected the uv islands in the uv editor are still visible also if uv sync selection is turned on you'll have to hover over each of those islands and press l to select them as you can see so in conclusion having the uv sync selection on or off has a set of advantages and disadvantages and it's really up to you how you want to use them the next thing is the method settings so i'm going to intentionally mess up its head uv island by giving it a different projection settings this is just to recreate the problem you might encounter when unwrapping from here i'll select those faces again and right click to unwrap now you see that this is obviously not the result we are looking for the simple fix for this to simply switch the method from conformal to angle based to wrap up this video i'll show you a trick that will easily convert your edge selection to seams and automatically unwrap itself using live unwrap now this only works with control clicking the edges to select edge loops to illustrate this you need to enable live unwrap which can be found here i'd click a starting edge and control click another edge to select a loop as i do that you'll see an option box that pops out at the lower left hand corner in that option box you'll see an edge tag option if i change that from select a tag seam then the edges i'll be selecting thereafter will automatically convert to seams and unwraps itself at the same time note that this is only for control clicking method and selecting edge loops so why didn't i do this early on because if you use this method tagging the edges automatically as seems will cause it to deselect them after the operation which means you'll not be able to use the shift ctrl m hotkey to mirror the seams to the other side so this method is ideal for non-symmetrical objects alright so this is the result of the uv unwrapping and layout i did for this creature using the same tools and techniques i shared in this video okay that wraps up this video thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Edgar Allan Yee

Views: 119,331

Keywords:

Id: m4mas3bNO3s

Length: 9min 10sec (550 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2022