UV Unwrapping in Blender - Essential Strategies & Texture Sets

hey guys in this video i want to talk about uvs specifically i want to discuss texture sets and how you can get higher resolution textures how many materials you should be using just kind of stuff that confused me a lot when i was first learning this stuff so here is a result for a door i created this just a very simple door nothing crazy here and here is the unwrap result as you can see this is a very high resolution unwrap these squares are at a very decent size so that way when i texture this in substance painter it's going to have some very high resolution textures now the way i accomplish this was by using different texture sets multiple texture sets now basically what i did i'll just show you each of these different pieces has a different material so each material has its own texture set very simple so we can just kind of click through here and you're going to see you know we have the door material we have the center material we have the supports material the shell material etc so what this means is that each of these materials will have its own set of uvs now why exactly is this powerful well i do want to mention that if you're using this as a game asset you probably don't want to have this many materials for an asset like this you probably want to use one maybe two max depending on how important of an asset this is and let me show you what exactly would happen if this was one single mesh using one single material the general guideline is the less materials the less draw calls and the better optimizations so that's why you don't want to use too many materials so let me show you just the solution we would use if this were a game asset here so basically what i would do is i'd have just one material on the whole thing and i'd probably have this whole thing joined together so so i'm going to go ahead and select everything and then press ctrl j to join it together into one piece so you're going to see i have all of these uvs here this is one single piece now since i joined it together so let's see what happens if i unwrap all of this onto one set of uvs rather than splitting them into multiple texture sets so we're going to go ahead and go to the uv editor and this is just kind of a mess so let me close this so we're just going to re-unwrap this i'm going to select everything press u and then unwrap and you're going to see the difference here let me zoom in a little bit you're going to see the squares are significantly bigger which means the text resolution is significantly smaller so you can kind of see the difference here's the before the after before and the after this is probably three times as a lower resolution so it's probably not going to be terrible but it's not going to be as crisp as this solution right here now we could do here is also pack this using uv pack master and just try to get a more optimized result here we could do quite a few things to get a more optimized result but if we join the whole thing together this is the solution we would have the squares would be okay but not the highest resolution we could get now for game assets this is probably a perfect approach you want to have maybe one material two at most um i'm just going to go ahead and remove all these extra materials because we're only sampling from one here so yeah this is just one mesh now and if this were a game asset this would probably be good enough another thing we could do here if we wanted a better resolution on these pieces we could actually mirror our uvs now let me show you how you could do this so i'm going to go ahead and just split this up again so we can demonstrate so notice how this piece and this piece right here are the same pieces just flipped over now what i've actually done off camera here is i have this slice in the center and what this slice in the center is doing is it's masking where i would be mirroring the uvs if i mirrored this piece if this was just one uniform joined piece if i mirrored it from the center we're going to have this butterfly effect kind of spanning out from the center let me show you what would happen if i deleted this half right here and then mirrored it what we're going to have is this butterfly effect that spans out from the sensor because the mirror point is directly in the middle and that's going to be pretty obvious to the viewer so basically that's the reason i ended up putting the its own separate piece here in the center is so that way i can still mirror my uvs but i'm masking that mirror point where that butterfly effect would occur so what i could actually do notice how these two pieces are occupying different areas on the um on this uh uv space right so instead of what i could do to make this a bit more optimized is i could simply delete out this one mirror this one and now what's going to happen is uh we're only going to be well these will basically all be overlapped since the mirror modifier is alive in the stack if i were to apply the mirror modifier notice how all these uvs are overlapping and this is going to optimize a bit more space here we can use a bit more doing this so this is another way you can actually optimize your uvs you can mirror pieces that are symmetrical so i could also go over here to these beams right here and let me just delete out this one and then mirror this one and we can also do the same thing for these windows right here we'll just go ahead and mirror the windows and also for this outer area let me delete out um this one right here and then mirror it so now check this out if i select everything we'll select everything and then we can just unwrap everything together maybe hit it with a few packs with uv pack master and just kind of see what solutions we can get this is just a quick and dirty solution i could probably you know straighten out some of these areas and make them just a bit more you know suitable for what we're doing here so i could for example use the uv squares to straighten those out and then we'll end up having a bit more space to kind of utilize here but yeah now you're gonna see the squares are actually a lot smaller now actually what i do need to do some of these squares are different sizes so to make sure the textile density is uniform i can go here in uv packmaster and normalize the island so when i pack it everything is the same size cool so you're going to see by doing that mirror trick we actually end up getting even smaller islands so this would actually be a a pretty good solution if this were a game asset because all we're using now is just one single material here and um if you wanted to join the whole thing together what you would have to do at this point is apply your mirror modifier but make sure you don't unwrap again otherwise it's going to undo those mirrored uvs so we'd apply all the mirror modifiers here like so and then all we would do is join everything together and you're going to see we still have our overlapped islands very good now i want to show you how you can actually use multiple texture sets so multiple materials to get even higher resolution this is a good strategy if you're doing a portfolio piece or perhaps just want to texture this without any worry about the optimization so maybe you just want to bring this into blender and get a clean looking render and you're not worried about the draw calls so in this case let me show you how i would actually approach that one so i'm going to go ahead and just um split everything up into separate pieces cool so in this case we're going to do things a little bit differently so i'm going to go ahead and um just start unwrapping this so i'm going to go to this piece and i'm still going to use the same technique as before i'm still going to mirror the uvs because my whole goal here is to make the squares as small as possible so um this one is going to have its own separate material so what i actually want to do here is i'm just going to clear out all these materials and we'll just start from scratch cool so what i'm going to do is select this piece and we'll add a separate material for this one we'll call this one shells or shell because this is like the outer shell of the door so each of these different pieces is going to have its own unique material so um this is a very good solution if you simply want to get a good portfolio piece and you're not worried about the amount of materials so this is how you can actually use multiple texture sets to your advantage so i'm going to go ahead and just start with the shell here we're going to need to add in a new um checker grid here so add in a new image texture here 4096 make it a uv grid then call this one shell click ok and then we'll go ahead and connect it up cool so i'm going to go ahead and mirror this over to this side and then simply unwrap it like that cool now this one's part of the shell as well so i'm going to go ahead and give this one the same exact material i'm going to unwrap it right now i'm not worried about the size of the squares we can deal with that later on so now for this one we're going to give this one a different material we're going to give this one a material and just call it supports and we'll do the same exact thing we can just um make a new image texture here click on new and then call this one supports connect it up and i'm simply going to mirror this one so that way we can overlap those uvs so we're going to unwrap it so the whole goal here is to make this whole thing as optimized as possible and then i'll show you the what we'll end up doing after we do that so right now just worry about getting as small squares as possible and then we'll make the texel density uniform after the fact so let's go to this one right here we'll go ahead and give this one we'll just call this one inner you can name it whatever you want really so we'll go to image texture we'll call this one inner connect it up mirror this one over to the other side and then unwrap it like so and then this one's gonna have the same exact one this just meant to mask that butterfly effect coming from the center cool now same for the door we're gonna give this one a material and call it door and we're going to add in an image texture i think you get the point by now but i just want to show you the full process we'll connect this up we'll go ahead and mirror it and then we'll go ahead and unwrap it and then for the window same idea we'll call this one window new image texture here window click ok and then connect it up and then we can just go ahead and mirror this because these are symmetrical pieces and we can simply mirror those uvs you don't have to if you think it's going to be a bit too obvious you don't have to but i'm doing it personally this one right here we'll just call center so we'll type in center i'm going to add in an image texture for this one and call it center and then we'll just go ahead and unwrap that one cool and now we just have one more up here which is like a light or something so this would be the last one we'll call this one lights give this one an image texture again call this one light connect it up and then unwrap it cool so now let's discuss the difference from what i showed you earlier on in the video and using multiple materials so by using multiple materials what i have are multiple texture sets so i have a texture set here a texture set here a texture set here which means i'm able to use a lot more uv space since i'm not using one uv uv grid to pack in every single island on this mesh for example for these supports these supports have their own little island here this outer shell has its own little island here right makes sense so each material is allowing me to use even more uv space now we could of course go in here and just try to make these a bit more optimized i could go to this one and try to pack it a bit more i could even try splitting up the islands to make it a little bit more condensed so we could try splitting up the islands that way and then packing it and to see what type of different solutions we get but what we need to do is make the texel density completely uniform here because for example this area in the center is going to have a much higher resolution and the area next to it since the squares are bigger is going to have a much lower resolution it's not going to make sense it's like it's going to be clear here but blurrier here it doesn't make sense so everything needs to have the same size squares so in a situation like this where you're using multiple different texture sets what you want to do is go to the one that has the biggest square so most likely that's going to be this one right here i'm going to go ahead and use zen uv here to get the textual density and you're going to see this one is 1108 pixels per meter i don't think these are any bigger okay cool so this is going to be the um be the one with the biggest squares and the reason we want to sample from the one with the biggest size squares is because we can always scale down but we can't always scale up let me show you what i mean if i go to these squares which are super super small on this one here i can easily scale these down right i can easily scale these down to get the same size squares that we have over here and that's going to give us the result we want so i could kind of scale this down and just eyeball it and you're going to see that's a very easy way to you know get the same size squares but you can't always scale up notice how if i scale up to make these smaller we go outside of the uv bounds which is going to end up causing tiling so that's why you want to sample from the one with the biggest size squares because everything else will be smaller meaning we can scale those in so an easy solution to get the same textile density all around is to simply scale these in and just kind of eyeball it so we just kind of go in and just eyeball all this stuff we could do the same thing for these we just scale it in and then kind of eyeball it now this will technically work but it's not going to be as accurate because if you want to get a truly accurate textile density you're going to want to force it using the number right here so if you want to get you know as much accuracy as possible what you want to do is go to the squares that are the biggest get the td and then you can select everything go to island mode and then set that td and then you're going to have a solution like this and you're going to see if i go around to all these areas all it really did was scale in these islands accordingly until it got the same exact size squares for each individual area and this is actually an example of where not using all your uv space is actually more beneficial because of our use of multiple texture sets here so yeah it's um for some reason i have an overlap right here if you ever find yourself having overlaps what you can do is just unwrap it again and then just set the td and that'll generally fix it so you can just kind of go in here and just check see if you have any weird overlaps which doesn't look like i do zen uv also has a feature to check for it but as you can see we now have a uniform textile density all around the mesh here so this is the power of using multiple texture sets as opposed to one single material if you're making a game asset you're probably going to want to use like one material for an asset like this maybe two kind of depends on the situation but if you just want to get a good quality result and you want the best texture resolution possible to split up all your different pieces of the mesh and give it its own material give it its own texture set because what you can actually end up getting are much smaller squares here which is going to give you even better texture resolution so this is how you can actually use multiple different materials to get a better resolution and also get the same exact textile density so i know this workflow kind of gets complicated but i hope it kind of gave you an idea of kind of how you can approach different situations like this and i would seriously recommend picking up um the zenuv add-on for this i think there's also a texel density checker which is free regardless there's no native tools that allow you to determine the textile density and blender so you're going to need some sort of add-on for this or you're going to have to scale in your squares manually and kind of eyeball it but that's about it guys i hope the video helped and i hope this gave you some insight onto different workflows you can use when approaching your uv unwrapping so i'll see you soon

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 25,775

Keywords: uv unwrapping blender, blender unwrapping, blender uvs, blender uv unwrapping, uv unwrapping, uv unwrapping tutorial, hard surface modeling, blender hard surface modeling, hard ops, boxcutter, zen uv, uvpackmaster, blender island packing, blender uv packing, substance painter, texel density, hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling blender, 3d modeling, blender textures, texture sets, materials, blender bros, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui, masterxeon1001

Id: j9uEqZxJMbY

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 23 2021