UVW Unwrapping in 3ds Max Part 1

hey everybody in today's video we're gonna try and explain a bit about one of the most tedious things that you're going to have to end up doing it sooner or later and that is UV unwrapping now UV unwrapping it can be quite a quite a complex theme to explain especially if you're just starting out and you don't know do not know how this thing works so I'm gonna try and just give you a simple idea of what actually UV unwrapping is the easiest way to explain this would be that UV is UV or UV unwrapping is basically the process in which you are telling max or whatever software you're working with how to apply a 2-dimensional image or to the image you can work in either Photoshop or some other photo manipulation software how would you apply that image to a three-dimensional model so to make this even more comprehensible let's say you have a model of a box like if you want to add any material to it like let's go ahead and open our material editor and over here I have two material I have the neutral gray and I have one more material which if I add it you're going to see it's a checkerboard material and if i zoom around you're going to see that right away max knows exactly how to position this texture on the actual model now the reason that max knows how to do this is that by default all the primitives or the standard primitives here have some kind of UV um uv-map applied to them so this is how basically map max words if you have a box like this by default it comes with a UVW map on top of it and once you click on the UVW map you're going to be presented with something like this for example here I can see that the texture is being presented quite nicely on the top but on the sides we have an issue and on the bottom it's great again the reason for this is that by the default uvw Maps you have mapping types you have the planar you have spherical which kind of depends Oh actually this is cylindrical which kind of depends on what kind of model you have you can choose the spherical one you can choose the box or the face in this case since we have an actual box if we just drop in a box UVW map then everything is fine so this would be great if we had one map that we simply want to apply to our model without having to work on it on in Photoshop for example if we just have a seamless texture that we want to span across the entire box this would be great but now what happens if we want to bethe well let's just call call it feeling what happens if we want to open up this box and be able to give each of these faces a different surface well this is where the UV unwrapping comes in to gate the time seemed to play so I'm just going to delete the UVW map as you can see nothing is changed so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to apply a UVW mapping clear so this is going to delete all of the informations that are up for this box I'm going to right click convert to editable poly so now we have no UVW mapping so since max doesn't know how to deal with the 2d image we have here like with this one it is showing me the base color as you can see here have black so this is why the box is black so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go ahead and click on the unwrap UVW map in case you don't have it here just go from the modifier list and just choose unwrap UVW alright here you as soon as we did this this is what we are seeing so again we have something like we had previously in this case though it is we we cannot choose the options that we previously had but now we are presented with a different set of options on the UV I'll need unwrap UVW so before we dive in deeper into the options of our unwrap UVW I just want to give you one last clarification on what actually is going it's supposed to happen with the unwrap UVW for example if we have something as simple as this it would require us to flatten it so we can actually draw on it imagine this is a box and you're working in a ware warehouse once you're done with a box in order to like preserve space you're going to have to find some way to get this to be flat and stack all of those boxes on top of each other so they're not taking so much space for example here's an image that is supposed to showcase this as you can see like right here we have our box and in this case as you can see we have these two parts folding out on the sides which can be seen here once the box is totally flattened out and now it's taking away a lot less space and at the same time instead of having it height it's just one strip of polygons now this is the base and the basics of UV unwrapping so if can look at this image over here you're going to see that this box is basically cut up so you can see that this edge here the one across and the one to the bottom has been detached from this side and this side so let's see how we can do this inside 3ds max so the first thing you need to know about unwrapping with the unwrap UVW is if you can choose the vertex s or the vertices you can choose to select the edges and the polygons in this case what I want to do is I'm going to select the edge and once you select the edge you're going to be able to click on the different edges so as we saw previously this these three lines should be cut in order for this side over here to fold down we're going to scroll around or actually rotate around to the other side and we're going to do the same thing over here so I'm going to call down control and select these three edges over here so I have all of those selected so how do we cut them the way to do it is if you scroll down over here with this peel underneath you're going to see seams this is the button you're looking for convert edge selection to seams as soon as you click it you're going to notice these red lines are going to convert to blue lines so this is basically it means that at these lines max is going to think about this box as if it were cut out so I the only thing that I need to do here is make one more cut for all of the all of these faces going across so again I'm going to click on this side over here and click on convert to selection to seams all right so this is what I have so far now let's see what happens I'm going to go ahead and click on open UV editor as soon as you open up this you're going to notice something you have this checker box in here and which is called the 0 to 1 texture space that means that everything that's inside this checker box is the texture that we're going to be using so we don't want to have anything protruding outside of this edge here because if it goes outside it's basically going to tile on itself alright so this is what I'm going to do I'm going to select my polygon here and in here I'm going to select all of the polygons the real and now I need to find a way to make this flat flat or flatten it so we have something like we had on this image so we want to flatten it like this the way to do it is once you have the UV better open you want to go ahead and switch over to mapping and now from here you want to choose unfold mapping it's going to ask you walk to closest face go okay as soon as this is done you'll notice some time we have exactly the same look like we had on our image like here here is since we cut those three lines over here and those three over here and the one going across we ended up with the same exact look over here as you can see it now if you take a look at our box we're going to notice that we have the same distribution of the polygons but now just to make it more obvious I'm going to increase the tiling to something five foot five so we can see it better maybe even more rather should work so basically what we did here is we made it possible that we can now export this image and we can work straight on this texture let's say in Photoshop and then once we re imported back into Max we can simply apply it to our model so this is the very first and most basic unwrapping and that is the unfold mapping where you just cut out a few edges and you can unfold the entire box but let's see what else we can do as you can see we have quite a bit of options over here so let's go ahead and try to explain a few more of these options so again I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to delete this unwrap UVW again as you can see we have nothing here and I'm going to go and apply a new unwrap UVW mapping for the second type of unwrapping I'm going to go ahead and add a new unwrap UVW as you can see have deleted the previous one so unwrap UVW we have a new one so in order to get this box unwrapped I don't have to go ahead and manually cut out these sides because this is a very easy to UV unwrap model because it's a very primitive box so what I can do here is I'm going to go ahead open the UV editor select all of the faces and now in the mapping instead of using the unfold mapping I'm going to go ahead and choose flatten mapping it is going to ask me to specify the polygon angle and the spacing this is basically the padding or the space that's going to be left between the UV aisles so in this case I'm just going to leave it at 45 and click OK as soon as this is done you're going to notice that all of these sides now have the actual texture applied to them but unlike the previous example you can see that now all of these sides can be moved individually without affecting the other ones so how can we make this to look like it was previously like one continuous piece well that's actually quite easy because all you're going to have to do is select just one of these sides or one of these edges and as soon as you select one of these edges it's going to turn red but what else you're going to notice is that one of the other sides is basically going to be close to it it's going to turn blue so how do we get these two to merge together all you have to do for this operation is right click and choose stitch selected once you click it you're going to now notice that here we have this white line and if we click here both of these you now be moved together or if we choose this option over here it says select by element UV toggle this means once I click here now both of them since they are not and they're not separate anymore but they're one continuous piece by selecting one both of them are going to be selected so I'm just gonna go ahead and unselect this so again let's try and stitch this portion over here so the bottom part over here with this so again I can either go right click and stitch select it or I can go ahead click on it over here like for this one and I can click stitch custom so it's going to custom stitch it to the one that's Torche next next to it and again stitch custom and one more time stitch custom so here we go we didn't have to cut out any of the edges over here but now if we take a look you're going to see that by simply stitching them together we already have the seams reapplied to our box now the only thing that you need to be careful here is let me just make this bigger so you guys can see it better like a previously said you want to make sure that your entire box is within the zero to one space so I'm going to go ahead select all of these faces and here you have the move rotate and scale buttons they correspond a correspond to the original you have buttons you have like the qwe and are the ones you have in max they work here as well so let's just scale and down just a tiny bit until they get to a size more manageable and to a size where we can use most of the texture space something like this there we go now in case these buttons don't work for you full of example for the qwe and are you probably just need to press this keyboard shortcut override toggle once you have this pressed everything should work out perfectly and if we take a look at our image now we're going to notice that the entire box has the textures applied to it so let's go ahead and try and see a few more other examples for me this was the first one and this is the actual box I'm going to hide it and I have another one which is a rectangle rectangles are pretty much an elongated box so it should be similar but it's going to give us a great opportunity to explain a few more of the options we previously saw with the box so again I'm going to go hit unwrap UVW and now I'm going to try and do this thing the same way we did it previously in the first example so I'm going to go ahead and select these three edges over here and one across again rotate select those three and now hit the UV editor now just like with the previous type we saw the first example at the box I'm going to go over mapping oops me too all right here is a problem like I just explained like five minutes ago and I messed it up again select all of these edges don't forget convert edge selection to seams as soon as those lines are blue that means there are seams so there you go I didn't want to edit this because well stuff happens all right again I'm going to select all of the polygons mapping and unfold mapping click to BOCES face okay all right so this is what we have here now this actually would work let's go ahead and just apply one texture to it this thing would work I'm not saying this is wrong but the thing is when you're working with models you want to use up as much as texture space as you can from the 1 to 0 some texture space so if we take a look at it here this side is way too long and it's taking way too much space so what we can do here is I can select this piece over here and now instead of having it come across on this side I can go ahead either try and break it off by clicking the button here with us under explode the first one says break or I can right click and break so once I have this broken off I can move it across to anywhere I want and similar like we did with the box I can select the edge select this one and hit on stitch and now as we can see we have a lot more we can work with I can just scale it up put it in position and this way now our rectangle rectangle is thinking a lot more of the original texture space which is something that we should be always trying to achieve so as you can see again the texture is great and we managed to explain how the break option works all right again I'm gonna open up my layers close this in the rectangle and open up a cylinder all right the cylinder is another primitive that comes back with Max and unlike the boxes it can have it actually not can but it does have a different geometry to it for example not all of its sides are flat and that is going to help us explain a few more of the other options that we can choose when we are unwrapping something like this all right so again I'm going to hit the unwrap UVW and by default you're going to see some green lines over here now these compact with the cylinder and since I don't want to have those and I want to have clean geometry or UV space I'm going to click a UVW mapping clear right click convert to editable poly and now I'm going to put an unwrap UVW so in this case we no longer have those lines so let's see how can we make this 3d example into 2d space well the first thing that we can do here is I can select the top polygon over here and if we take a look at it from the top over here you're going to see this is actually a circle so I can use one of the projection options that the unwrap UVW has and those projection options are over here for example you have planar map you have cylindrical map you have a spherical map and box map or I can simply choose to click on the quick planar map this quick planar map is simply going to add a planar projection to whatever I have selected so you're going to click on quick planar map and you're going to see that on the edges now I have this green line I'm going to go over do the same thing on the bottom quick planar map again I have one here so what I want to do here is take one of these edges click here and click on this button loop so this is basically like when you're modeling and you want to loop one of the edges it's doing the same exact thing is just selecting all the edges that are going or spanning on that loop so now again I'm going to convert the edge two seams so now I have this top portion and the bottom portion there you'll select it and both of them if we open the UV editor you're going to notice one thing this portion over here is on its own this one is on its own and if we take a if we click on this or any of these polygons I can go ahead and click this button over here with that says expand polygon selection two seams so it's going to select all of those polygons now since I can see that these edges did not get turned into a seam I'm gonna probably gonna have to go ahead and well let's just see if we can turn those into seams so again deselect well yeah now they should be if they're not oh it's gonna be a problem but it shouldn't be alright so again let's select all of these ah so that's why one of the things that you need to be careful is once you click this ignore back-facing so that this means that whatever I'm seeing here when I make a selection like this if the ignore back-facing is selected thing on the other side has been selected so make sure you check that that one off and now I'll just select selective like this there we go we have all of these selected all right so how do we make this flat well like I told you previously we have this projection option over here you can click on the cylindrical map and right away it's going to add this yellow cage over here and you can see that this cage is we can just click on fit it's going to go downwards and it's going to make our selection flat which is exactly what we want here so again they select and now you're going to notice that we have this here flat surface and we can work on now the only thing that I can notice here is if we zoom in a bit all on all the sides you have green lines the problem is that once you get here you're going to notice that these lines that are coming inwards of green as well this means that we have a problem that problem is that these vertices that are on that line if we move them around you can see that those are not bolded so I can select those control W to weld them and this is that green line is removed from the inner part that means we no longer have that problem and we can just move this and it's going to be the same exact okay so ctrl W is your shortcut for the weld all right so let's see what is happening now with our model all right we're going to go ahead and apply this alright so as we can see our model has some texture but if we take a look at the top and the sides it really doesn't look like it's doing its job properly because not all of these cubes or sides are the same so that means the first thing that's wrong is that the size of all of these is not the same now in order to get this to be the same we're going to have to make a selection over here and I'm going to go select this entire thing I'm going to have to make it smaller usually if I were to do this I would put it on my other screen so I can watch it but since I'm the program or the recording program wouldn't see anything what I'm doing I'm going to have to deal with this this way so what I'm going to do is click here and scale it in one of ups let's go ahead scale it in one side and you're going to notice this as soon as I'm scaling it in one direction those cubes are either getting squashed or stretched and they are getting to be a similar size as the ones on the top now this used to be the old way of doing it anything that's you know anyone that's working on a version I think if you have a newer version than 2011 you should have this new layout which is going to allow you or give you access to one of the most amazing buttons and this is this rescale element once you click it both of your or actually not both but all of your UV islands are going to get the same exact UV space size so all you're going to have to do here is just select you know whoops move this across and now if I want to take this you can go and simply just select this one right click and go stitch on the bottom right click stitch so now the next thing that I want to do is get all of this into my zero to one space and this would be easiest to achieve it with the Pat custom so just click this and Max will put it inside the texture just move it up here and now you're going to notice this our cylinder is basically you be unwrapped so with this I would like to put end on the first example because this video has been spending a bit too long for me so in the second part we're going to tap now we're going to try and deal with some of the more complex shapes and we'll see where it goes from there so see you in the next video

Channel: Denis Keman

Views: 141,102

Keywords: uvw, uvw unwrapping, Autodesk 3ds Max (Award-Winning Work), tutorial, dkcgi, texturing

Id: EEtPGUovpK0

Length: 30min 57sec (1857 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2015