UVs for Beginners - UV mapping a Head in Maya

hey guys heading in Morton from flick normals here in this video we're just going to quickly cover the basics of UV map being ahead in Maya for this we assume that you're not really familiar with the concept of mapping ended tools so it's gonna be relatively basic so first we just quickly just want to talk about what ieave map is this is something I struggle with personally for quite some time just like it seemed like it seemed like a very technical thing and I didn't really understand the basics of it so a UV mapping is essentially the basis for your model when you when you start to texture it without the use map you can't really texture at all so in C bus we can just quickly show you what even up this here so this model here has been mapped out and if we go into a tool even map and you more Phebe's it's gonna look awesome this is just to give you a basic representation of what it is you don't need to worry about any of this English stuff really it looks fancy but essentially what you can see here is we have a 3d model and now we have a 2d representation of this this is like like animal pelts like if an animal has been skinned that is essentially a 2d representation of what the animal looked like when it was you know an animal so this just looks awesome but this is so that once you have a 2d representation of this in in something like Photoshop or like any other 3d 3d painting software you cannot just start painting on this like if you want color on the ear you could essentially paint color in the ear and in these various areas this is just so that your 3d software has a 2d representation of what your model actually looks like so how do we actually do this we we use my 2018 you and you bring up the UV window but go into UV and you go to UV editor right here so by default now you're not really gonna see anything in the editor because you don't really have the UVs so the very first thing we have to do is we have to just get something in here the way I've done this is I've gone to just select the model and then I'm going to UV and then use a simple planar map you can also just select a police in here shift right mouse button go to mapping and you select planar map automatic map and one node this doesn't matter at all the only thing we care about here is so do we get something in here it's kind of like throwing paint at a canvas we also have to enable a checker or UV checker you can do this by hitting this button here I don't person like this I think this is a very confusing checker I actually feel a bit nauseous just by looking at this this is similar like the life something is transparent in Photoshop I actually conflict at that so I usually get a better checker from this you can do this too simply by googling UV checker and there are tons of really cool ones so the ones we're gonna be using is I'm gonna show you real quick let's go into our shader and we've already set one up here so you just go into your file mode and select your checker so this is one I really I really prefer to use so select that and then just go to the texture view here so now you can see it in the viewport and you also have two tile list across a few times here so you do this again to the follow mode place 2d texture nut and here you can set the repeat so you can set this to by default this is a new one which means it's gonna repeat once it's gonna tile once across but setting them to seven it's gonna repeat seven times so we set this some like three and it's gonna it's gonna have a different scale here now you're gonna wholeheartedly recommend the color color checker just because it makes it a lot more easy not just on your eyes but also checking for distortion yes and warping in in your map it will does so going back to to the very basic stuff here if you were to paint a texture map on this so this here will be the map you would export your export out the square from from from the editor and you would paint this in Photoshop you could only paint on this side here you can paint a pretty cool texture right here but you would not be able to paint anything on it like around the nostrils or inside here yeah the checker gives a perfect representation of what would happen to your texture as soon as you approach anything that's sort of in the center you would have crazy distortion even with something like Mari you you don't have access to that information in your movie map no so so we have to go proper unfolding of this because currently we just been throwing in here and we have to actually cut the model up the way I like to think about this is this is more maybe for the body but it's like if where are your seams for for your clothing that's a bit hard for the head you're gonna say seams for something else it's of Frankenstein's Magnus's monster or something and you had seems you had it you have to split this up into something 2d where would the same speed so for clothing that's very for a body that's very easy in a way that you just look at your clothing the clothing is already even mapped because that's how we start out this start off flat and now they're in 3d if you think about something like gloves for example a little more complex thing but you look at how gloves are actually sewn together you have like the sausages for the fingers different for the palm so you can think of it like that hits are obviously a little different yeah that's a bit macabre but so we're just gonna cover some basic tools here so the way we select stuff here let's just quickly take away the checkered is we we start cutting stuff off by selecting the edges so if we want to cut off the neck here let's say we want this to be a separate thing you can just double click here select the edge and you can go under shift right mouse button and hit cut this hotkeys also shift X which is quite handy this is this hotkeys new and my on 2018 so you can just do cut I know you can see that this here has been cut off here if you click this button here you can see the you can see the texture borders this is really quite useful because now you can clearly see where the seams are like in the viewport here we can clearly tell that the seams are are active so if you now were to move this around you can just duplicate víctimas in polygon mode and just move them out you can also go into UV you see here right mouse button you have your shell vertex face if you go to use shell this is gonna select an entire thing here really useful stuff that's pretty handy and now you can just move this around so if you want to sew this together again you can two seams here all the seams all of these guys here and then we can go to sew and I was just gonna stitch them back so important thing to note here is that it only the the sewing tool is only concerned about the edges like supporters it doesn't matter like you see Henning doing here selecting parts of the inside of the mouth and stuff that doesn't matter because there are no borders in there exactly you also do stitch together and that's gonna move and sew them together I think the way that it works it looks at the biggest mass and then moves the other one closer to that mass yeah mass and then so is it together so you don't get the distortion yeah so this is do that for this example here we're just gonna have one piece here and I'm going to show you real quick now how to where I would put the seams here so the first thing I'm gonna do is enable symmetry because this is a perfectly symmetrical head so if you hold on the W key you get you get options here for the move tool so go to symmetry and then use to enable symmetry on the top here I know you can see this is supposed to be an x-axis so now we have sin finagled so a good thing I think to note here especially with with a head is that there are many wrong ways to UV map ahead yeah but there are also a lot of correct ways there isn't just one way there isn't one way to the DS here here are our cuts should be yeah because in reality in production you would end up with a lot of different UV sets maybe you have a set bespoke for rigging one for effects one for for for texturing yeah and all these require different things from the mesh so there are many ways to skin up ed yeah so the way I like to do this is I like to I like to minimize the amount of seams in important area so if you're gonna texture the head here you generally want to have as few cuts as possible in this region here just because that just makes it a lot easier in texturing at least in traditional texturing if you were to simply do this in something like Photoshop if you paint it in some like Mari where you place your seams is of less importance if the reality is when you have a 3d painting software you could even be like like like 3d body paint body paint yeah yeah like the reality is it doesn't matter as much anymore it's there are good practices of course and some things like you won't want to split things like cross the cheekbones because it just makes it confusing for the texture artist yeah so we're just gonna select one from all over here and all the way through Center this isn't this is where I've been doing it for years so just here and just across the forehead and now we can just hit the shift X key for cut and now you can see that this has been cut in the viewport and if you want to select these kind of edges to still select the edge hold down shift double click on the other edge you want to select sue and then just selects the entire range up until that point so what more than a second after one sector Ranger shift I click this one hold on a shift key and then just double click it this is amazing when my mom I didn't have this it was incredibly hard to actually do anything so second few cuts sorry it's like a few cuts again here from here to here in in the UV editor again hit shift X just make sure that's all cut we have like a mouth bag here so select this on the inside here so that it's just maybe it's a bit it's a bit further in here so the lips here so we don't really have any in the nasty seams on the lips so I hit the ship X Q again and I mean that's that's almost it for for a basic basic you mom this is not gonna be the best map in the world this is just very quick example we will have way more advanced videos later on we show how to deal with proper younam's and good conventions for proper 3d painting this is just to get started with it yeah because ideally when you think about it the hard parts are where things are really close together and have complex curves like the ear yeah and you even something like the inside of the nose like the nostrils that's tricky yeah inside of the eyes let's call the eye bag and I back so the eye bag is well they'll be hard to cram that information in there yeah so there are cuts that would be helpful to have but not necessary so I'm just gonna cut off the ears as well man who made that report you around the ears man that's really that's really good model not frustrating all t enough i wonder who was the actor so now we just selected all these guys scene and we also prom need a cut it's probably to cut from the back here as well and also where these cuts are this is going to become intuitive later on if this doesn't feel intuitive right now it's fine don't worry too much about hitting really struggling with it so yes sometimes the cuts makes sense and there's also it also really depends on the structure of the head sometimes you want to cut in the back of the neck sometimes you don't I mean it's it's very dependent on the mesh yeah so now we have all our cuts here now this is where the magic really happens because you can sell nothing's really happened so if you were to just like right now is actually one bit slow because it's symmetries on so we'll just first disable symmetry again so go W symmetry and disable symmetry so if we were to just like move this kind of stuff out now double click it as a secondary thing yeah we can move it but we aren't really any closer to it so what we need to do now is we need to do what's called unfolding so we do this by going to ev2 right click go to you and just select all of them and shift right mouse button and have this little guy here called unfold and we're not gonna worry about any of the settings here we're just gonna do unfold and now you're gonna see what happens so now this is now been unfolded let's just move these guys out I remember in 3ds max like when they introduced tilt mapping all that was one of the things we're like yeah okay maybe it makes sense now but I I I didn't do you ease for the first three to three three no took a long time to understand that like I was scared of you visa so now you can see what's actually happening difference now is that you can see that we have we have data everywhere this is the UV tools in Maya are actually pretty damn solid they used to be how do you say this atrocious and not usable in any way that's what people use something like moto UV layout or just general new tools but today I do all my even mapping straight in Maya I used to I actually used to take it into ZBrush mmm like UV master stuff on everything and this just it's an annoying workflow yeah cuz this just kind of works yeah so obviously now if you were to export this out if you export out a single texture map is this square right here so from here to here this is what's called I you didn't we will get more into this later on in future videos but essentially you want everything that will be packed into a square so we have some packing tools as well but before we do that we're just gonna look at another feature here called optimize because right now it's it's we've laid this out or we've been unfolding this once now but we can there might be some issues in it so we can just go right shift right mouse button and optimize I know you can just see that everything just kind of gets a bit optimized everything just gets a bit more even here so that's quite useful you can also to go to the settings here and just set the amount of iterations here I also make sure that your unfold 3d plug-in is loaded and it the method is set to unfold 3d the legacy one you don't want to use cuz that's terrible so I think if you are in an earlier version of my I think the optimize was called relax if I remember correctly yeah it might be in case you're in the 2018 yeah so you can also you can just go here in such multiple iterations ah relax yeah yeah I usually just hit the G key you also do the same thing under unfold you have options here as well but setting this to 1 this is you do often have to do this more than one so you can set it to 10 I usually my default setting so like between 5 and 10 for the unfold and maybe 50 to 100 sometimes in the optimize depending on the mesh that I'm working with yeah so you see this now it takes a bit longer but it's just it's just a bit more resolved now so let's just take all these guys now and we want to pack them nicely into this little square we have the layout tools and you can see here we have layer goobie's as you see what happens then this just essentially moves in everything into etc you can do this with the unfold option automatically so when you unfold it also packs them sometimes you want this most of the time you don't you see the pack option here so if you enable this let's just do this I don't like to have isn't a human either because so actually oh it actually looks really good that's very symmetrical so this is suitable I just don't like it because I don't control it perfectly the problem with packing is that even if she just liked one part of your mesh I think it packs everything I connected to that mesh yeah so I prefer to do this in separate operations here so let's say this is out here and it's a bit crazy we can now just go to layout and you can do the layout QV so you can delay it along you pour layers along with V as well so I clearly didn't work that amazing but a good starting point is for sure it's going under layout so unfold and just enable the pack yeah this is a good starting point I prefer to arrange this just by myself yeah and also because once you start arranging it you know your texture artist or whatever you whoever you answer to might have specific needs for for your layout yeah so an automatic layout is not always the best thing to know but I mean that's that's essentially it for UV mapping like this is a big big topic which you can go into for days and all that amended tools here like if you see all the menus and all this crazy stuff here it's crazy like there are so many tools here but essentially I use a few hotkeys whenever I'm doing any kind of mapping this is what we just showed you here is the exact same way I do this for when we do this for movies this is 90 percent of 90 percent of it yes like you know when we sculpting suppose you use our two brushes so just sum this up you open if you UV editor for going to UV UV editor you select stuff here but going just selecting edges you can do cut now we'll just cut it you can double click on something and then just move it around you can use you can go to UV shell to move the entire shell around but it's still a double clicking you can use some so to bring stuff back together again if you want to do this you can do is so or you can use stitch together and there are tons of options for all these guys as well but essentially these are the options we use once you have something like this you can export this out to to photoshop and you can start painting on your own your texture here we will definitely like I said go more further in depth than this so if you if you see that there are like you big conventions missing from this video we will cover that in the future such as you Tim's how to do a body how to bring this into different software etc etc this is just to give you a very basic understanding of what you do nothing is so I hope this has been a really useful video so if you want to see more content like this in the future don't forget to Like comment and subscribe thank you you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 70,691

Rating: 4.930131 out of 5

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, twitch, mjthehunter, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character, Uv mapping, head, Introduction to UV, Maya UV mapping, ZBrush UV

Id: uMUQeLStdpk

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018