What are UDIMS? Full Tutorial and Workflow

hello everyone and welcome to another important video here in the channel today we're going to be talking about udm and if you guys want to get to this result right here being able to extract some very nice textures texture your element inside of subance painter and bring all of this amazing texture files into Maya to get the most pristine and high quality results then you're not going to want to miss this whole process in this process I'm going to be showing you not only how to set up udims but also I'm going to be explaining why udims are so important and what type of projects are you usually going to be like dealing with them now before we jump there I just have a very quick announcement as you guys know at the time of this recording our first contest is ongoing so if you want to participate we still have or you still have a chance to do so it's completely free and you can win a $100 there were some questions that were asked during the weekend about the specific requirements it is or it does need to be a game engine ready um weapon you can find more of this information in our Discord so make sure to join and we're not going to be asking the model from from you we just want to see the final render and some Works in progress to make sure that you have proper topology and proper textures so yeah this video might be useful for some texture tips but you're probably not going to be able to use udims so let's go to the video very well let's start then with the basics of understanding what udims are why we're going to be using them and how we're going to set them up first things first in the comments of this video I'm going to leave a link to this PDF right here this is not my PDF credit where credit is due this is from Timothy D orus and he has a very nice write up here on why Texel density is so important Texel density is the amount of surface that you're covering with your UVS and it will have a very big impact on how your objects are going to be seen on a render on a video game on whatever type of like production you're going to be doing it's not very often that you're going to be working with specific texos like not very often do I get clients telling me this object has to have the 60 Tex resolution or whatever but it is important to understand why Tex are important and Maya has a very cool tool to check what the current texal resolution of your object is so as you can see right here this is my typical UV this is the cannon that I have right here this has more Cuts than what you might normally see on objects like this but it's important because we're going to be doing something a little bit later with the UDS so if we grab all of the islands right here and we go to the transform top of our object and we check the transform information you're going to see that we have this option right here which is the tool to know what the texal density is for our object let's say we're going to be using 2K Maps so 2048 and I'm going to say get and if I click on that button we're going to get a four units of texal density which means that we're going to have four pixels for every centimeter of surface that our object has that's way too little it's it's very little resolution and that means that if we were to texture this cannon even if we try doing amazing textures we're not going to have enough resolution and I'm actually going to show you right now always keep our UV Maps inside the one to one space usually that is the rule but in this particular case we're again going to break that rule and we're going to start moving all of these islands scaling them up and occupying way more like space than what we normally would in this case I want to occupy 16 squares so we're going to make this as big as roughly this size right here and if I check the texal resolution now we should have 15 or 16 which is four times more than what we have so ideally we're going to get the exact same texture that we have right here but it's going to look four times more uh refined or sharpen than what we have right here now we we're not just going to do this this is not the the way to do it because um we're going to have some issues so the way we're going to be using udm is as follows first you need to make sure that you have all of your vs properly set up if you don't know how to set up UVS we do have a video that I'm going to link over here and you can check our five like tips to getting nice GVS once you have that you're going to go to tools you're going to go to sorry modify and then layout and here inside of layout we're going to turn off shell pre- rotation and we're going to turn off shell pre-scaling because ideally we want our shells to remain like this this is from again from the UV video where I make sure that everything is aligned in the same direction once I have this I'm going to go all the way down here to this layout settings and I'm going to tell it hey we're going to be using 248 Maps I want to have four pixels of distance between each shell and I want to have four pixels of distance from the border of each of my udims and I'm going to have in this case 4x4 four so I I want 16 UB tows you can change this you can have like 10x two or 8X two it really doesn't matter as much I'm going to do 4x4 just to follow this example that we have right here and I'm going to hit apply once we do that what's going to happen is we're going to get this distribution right here my uh software in this case Maya is going to try to pack everything into a 4x4 setup and it's going to use the biggest island such as this one as its reference point to try to get everything where it's supposed to be now unfortunately if I check this and I check the getting information we're going to get a lower number 16 so in this particular case this one's not working as uh as well as I was intending and one of the reasons is the scale of the objects is changing you can see these two guys right here are way bigger than these two guys right here so that means that probably something like went wrong so I'm going to grab everything again I'm going to go to uh again modify layout I'm going to turn on the shell prescaling to preserve 3D ratios and I'm going to try again heat apply this should give me as you can see a way better distribution everything should be fitting nicely inside of this element and if I again get my udm resolution we're going to get 15.5 which is almost 16 it's perfectly great so now we have a huge texture map if we wanted to make this an actual texture map based on our 2K map this would be 2K 4K 6K 8K map it will be an 8K by 8K map but those Maps even though it's possible to create them are very very big they're like gigabytes of of space so it's not easy to process that it's easier to break that down into smaller maps in order to get that resolution which is what we want now one important thing that we do need to do before going into um into uh substance is we need to go and add a u Checker to our element to modify or check how the elements are looking and as you can see we get this now ideally every single part of your object should have the same density however you can see here that we have a little bit of a difference like this guys are a little bit bigger these guys are a little bit smaller so there's a little bit of of a problem there can we fix that of course if you go to UV and you go to UV shell for instance I can see that this ones are very small which means that they have more density and if we go to the UV editor and find where those are which apparently it's this one right here we can literally just scale them down and by doing that not that one this one there we go by scaling them down did we not selected should be that one do we have the textures turn there we go that's really weird that's not working but by scaling them down we should be able to match the perfect like U scale it's not the be or it's not the end of the world if you don't have everything similar because we're going to be using some tricks inside of substance to get rid of the seam lines so the difference in texture quality again is not going to be um that bad but if you have one piece let's say um like this one right here and the resolution of that piece is really really really small should be over here like that that one right there and if we make the resolution really really really small what's going to happen is we're not going to have as much uh surface oh it's a it's a duplicated effect appar there we go uh so I the other one there we go so as you can see if we grab this shell right here and we make it really really small that's going to be a problem so as long as the UB Tex will are really close and this applies to a single object or multiple objects as long as the UB texal are really close to each other you're going to be fine so in this case this one as uh we just mentioned here let's go number three there we go so with this done our element is ready to go into substance painter for its texturing process and the texturing is going to be pretty much the exact same thing the only thing that's going to change is that now we're not going to be working with only one texture it's going to be all of this 16 textures so this is definitely happy for your GPU or your computer that's why this process this juding process is not used a lot in the Indie Productions because usually the equipments that we have in Indie Productions are not as powerful as what they have in AAA Studios and this is also not something that you're going to use a lot in video games this is mostly used for like cinematics commercials and film however I have worked in certain projects a couple years ago I worked for a Diablo Immortal commercial and we did use udims for this sort of stuff so I'm going to export this selection I'm going to export this as a Canon very important that you export it as an fbx and we're going to be ready to go into substance so keep a mental image of this thing actually don't keep in the mental image let's go back to 2K which was our original um like resolution and let's focus on the on the wood grain right here I'm going to grab my Snipping Tool and I'm going to save a copy so that you guys can compare the difference that UDS make going to now create a new file here inside of substance it's going to be a 2K and very very important if we're using udm we need to use this options that says use UV tile workflow we're going to select our Cannon and we're going to hit open and hit okay save actually no we don't want to save that one file New Canon okay 2K open G is fine because it's going to be going into Arnold and use U tole warer and we discard perfect so our Canon is right here we have 2K textures but what the difference is now over here you're going to see all of our tiles in this case we should have about 12 tiles if I or sorry 16 tiles if I'm not mistaken wait did I not save this thing properly let's make sure that we have the proper thing right here oh this is an old one the hell give me one second let's redo that real quick there we go so as you can see now we have our 16 tiles over here all of this tiles we got the 1 1 one2 13 and so on and so forth 16 TS at 2K which again would be equivalent to an 8K resolution or an 8K element if we grab again our runwood and we go here to layers we're going to be able to drag and drop this into layers and this will apply every single Un them so instead of just painting one slot we're painting all of the things at the same time now I'm going to change this to tr projection again and if you remember we did a titling I believe it was titling of five we're going to hit okay and now if we look in here look at that we can actually see every single part of the detail it's pretty much the exact same like uh like marks and everything but now we're actually seeing the detail one thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to turn on the hide information so that we can actually see all of the of the damage of the wood right there I'm probably going to bring it down so I'm going to go to my height menu and just bring the height information a little bit lower so it's not as intense but look at how nicer and crisper this texture looks this is what's going to allow me to be able to generate and create textures that are going to look way way more intense and more important specifically on closer shots now you can see here as I move this thing it's updating a little bit slower why because it needs to think about 16 towels so it's pretty much as if I was like texturing 16 different cannons at the same time so again as I mentioned it's a very cool process but it's definitely something that's a little bit complex as well going to bring the roughness down a little bit so we can see a little bit more of that effect now the way we're going to be getting rid of all of those seam lines because we did need to cut the object a little bit more is Again by using try planner projection let's go here into mask mode and let's select uh object mode select all of these guys usually when working with udm I do recommend working at 2K resolution and then if you need to export everything at uh 8K at or 4K at at the end because if you try to work at 4K it can definitely be a little bit heavy I have a 380 ti so I have enough like like video card memory and I can still struggle with uh with this sort of things if you have like a like a 3090 or 4090 with 24 4 GB of of texture space then you might be able to work with it but in this particular case I don't have that so I'm going to go let's see for this metal bit over here for like a metal effect I'm going to grab this metal grind which is a very cool one I can again change this U projection to tripler projection here's a cool uh trick you can copy this mask so I'm going to copy the mask over here copy mask and then I'm going to paste into mask and then I'm going to right click and I'm going to invert the mask that way I don't have to do any manual selection because the other one was the wood and it's a very very easy way to to just mess this thing now this thing as I mentioned it's a trade planner projection and we can increase the tiing to let's say a three that way we're going to get a smaller like detail on the metal we're going to be able to get a very very nice effect so look how close we can get to the object like this is how like nice the the ud them is going to allow us to work we can get all the way to this point because it's going to allow us to to generate a very cool effect one thing that's very important even though we don't have a high poly we can still do the do the bakes so I can do like a 2K bake for everything but keep in mind that we're going to be baking down 16 maps of each of all of the elements right here so if I hit bake selected it's going to go through each individual un them and it's going to do the normal the world space normal the ID the amp to custion the curvature the position and the thickness it's a lot of information this is why this project working with udims can get very very heavy usually when I'm working with udims I try to keep my Texel resolution at about 10 pixels per like a unit and and that's a good amount but there have been certain projects where I need to go like this and again on the Diablo project that I mentioned um we went to like 40 or 60 like EMS per character which is definitely definitely heavy but required for really high Productions like those especially if you're working in things like 4K and the like so let's just very quickly wait for this to finish and I'll show you a couple of generators to to get this texture looking very very nice so we're going to go back to the painting information as you can see everything loads and right now it's running fine uh like uh as you can see on the cash disc usage I'm 96% so that means that I'm running like very low on the on the amount of memory I'm not sure if it's the disc that's very getting or getting close to full or if it's the ram but it's it's definitely taxing on your computer so let's just add two very basic layer let's add a rust layer on top of everything as you can see takes a little while to load all of the textures I'm going to add a black mask and of course we're going to be adding a generator and we're going to use our dirt generator and this is going to give us a very nice like dirt effect on all of the areas where the ambient osion is more evident this one for rust since it has a little bit of color I usually like the multiply which is going to turn everything a little bit darker but again if we uh zoom in in just a second change this multiply let's try linear Dodge no multiply should be it I'm not sure why it's not updating but look at the detail on the rust like that's a really really really nice detail so we can go really clean in there again the rust also needs to go into triplan and projection otherwise we're going to get this like divisions right there and even the generators like the this dirt generator you might need to go here and use this option which is Tri planner so that we get a nice like um uh like fade throughout the whole thing let's try overlay for some reason it's not oh we're in height my bad we were in height information multiply there we go so with the multiply cuz overlay is it's going to it's going to give me like a weird color actually not that bad there we go now let's do a very like traditional metal Edge wear so I'm going to add this uh like not the galvanized uh metal let just do met metal brushed I'm going to add a black mask and I just want to do this and the little wheels right here so we had the galvanized met over there again of course you need to use the trade plan projection to make sure that we don't get any any any weird effect we're going to add a black mask we're going to add a generator and this is going to be of course the metal Edge wear is going to give us some very nice effects this one I'm going to multiply against the the mask the original mask and it should give us a a nice effect am I seeing it or do we need to increase the wear level uh did they change something should be working right here met brush is the color Too Close maybe the color is too close let's add a black mask oh it should be there okay let's set the generator and the metal edgear there we go it's a little bit close so I'm going to change this to linear Dodge there we go and then I'm going to multiply this and on the mask I'm going to select that guy there we go as you can see it's hitting all of the all of the wheels and stuff very very nicely I'm not doing the fancy tricks that we normally do for the for the metal in this case I'm going to keep it like this so that we can appreciate all of the like little details but again like look at how clean and and nice this looks and once again I can change this 248 to 4K which would essentially bring my texture from 8K all the way to like 32k or something like that because from 4K to 8K it might seem like you're doing twice but it's not twice it's four times remember anytime we're talking about textures it's always exponential growth uh I just want to do one more layer here I'm going to go on top of the wood I'm going to add a flat color this is going to be a like scratches that I want to add so let's just go for like a nice like pale wood right here let's increase the roughness and the height I'm going to bring it down I'm going to add a black mask and I'm going to add a field layer this is going to be a scratches and you can see all of the scratches right there on the wood again look at the detail we get a very nice detail thanks to the fact that this map allows us to have this much amount of of element even we're even getting some scratches on the on the cannon which I think actually looks quite quite nice so yeah that's it for this part now we're going to jump onto the exporting of this textures so here's how we do it we're going to go to file and I'm going to go to a export textures and we're going to export at 2K again as I mentioned you can export this at 4K but don't want to go overboard with this element I'm going to create a new folder here on the desktop called Canon and here on the Canon folder is where we're going to export everything in this case we're going to export this for Arnold so it's going to be Arnold AI standard PNG is fine and we're just going to hit export and what's going to happen is we're going to be exporting all of the sets of elements that we need base color emissive height metalness normal and roughness for one of each of the different udm sets and we get all this full information right here it's a lot it's a lot of information if we go to the the desktop right here and we check the um the folder you're going to see that we have a total of 200 megabytes for the whole element now I know that we don't need the height information so we can delete that we're only going to need this which is color metalness normal and roughness that should be more than enough if we want a displacement we can use HDE in this case it's totally fine but still like this is almost 191 megabytes of texture information it's a lot but it's a lot smaller 191 megabytes is a lot smaller than a 1K texture usually one a 14k texture it's about 50 megabytes per each image so that would be like just one set of 4K textures would be 50 megabytes per texture so that's 200 Meg it would be like 1 Gigabyte if we wanted to make this a 4K texture so again udm are a very good way to do it the only thing that's a little bit tricky about udm is the connection but in Maya it's actually very simple we're just going to go to Maya I'm going to sign or actually I'm going to use the substance plugin I'm going to go over here to substance I'm going to use this button that says apply workflow to materials and in this map I'm going to go and grab only the first one one the one that says one1 of the base color of the metalness of the normal map and of the roughness and I'm going to say select it's going to automatically like notice the flag of the name and it's going to connect it I'm going to hit apply and it's going to create a new a new Shader that new Shader is usually going to be an AI Stander it's this one AI Stander surface 3 and this one if you go into your hypershade you're going to see that this material that we have right here already has everything connected the only thing we need to change is we need to go to each specific specific one of this guys go to the UV tiing mode and change this to udm okay this is the way we're going to tell it hey this is the first of how many textures we have in this case 16 so we change that to udm and that's it we do the same for the material so we go to udm we do the same for the normal we change this to udm and we do the roughness and we do udm and there we go now you're not going to see them on your viewport because it needs to load them into memory that's why we get this like red button right right here my advice if you don't need it don't do it because again this is extra memory and if you're going to do it try to do it a low quality such as 1K and only do it for the color just so that you see where things are and if I generate a preview now the textures are going to load I'm going to start seeing some of the textures like the wood elements over here you might need to load everything else but you can see how they're right there and don't worry too much about this because this is only important at render time a lot of people when they're working on this sort of things they use this little butt right here which is the default material and you're just going to see everything gray and then in render time things are going to look good now I do have my own little like setup right here except for the hdri I think this one's missing so let me just like bring another one right here like this at dancing hle there we go and let's go to our camera and let's go panels look through select I'm going to change the resolution of this thing so let's go for a traditional full HD go really close in here like this and I'm just going to move this thing down a little bit so it looks like this thing is sitting on top of it everything else should be properly like uh calibrated so I'm going to save the scene real quick and of course one other thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my system I'm going to be using GPU and we're going to hit render so I'm going to hit render and the first thing that's going to happen remember this the first thing that's going to happen is that all of the textures are going to be converted to TX files which is going to take a little while so let's hit render okay so Maya crashed and it was a little bit of expected I actually I think I asked a little bit too much I I had other things open such as substance so here's another trick that we can do uh the the whole thing is already set up and everything but it it was trying to do the conversion at the same time it was going to render that's usually not ideal so we can go to Arnold utilities and to the texture manager over here I'm going to refresh and let's see if we got any over here should should be working fine do we have the udm setup yes the udm setup is right there so technically on the utilities of the texture files there we go we're going to be processing all of the textures so again I'm just going to give it a little while for it to process the whole thing and then we're going to shoot the render and here we go this is the result of the render it's just a normal full HD render but with 16 U them Tiles at 2K resolution and you can see the difference on the effects that we have right here on top of this we can of course add a d noiser to make sure that we remove all of the noise and again you might not notice too much of a difference if this was just the final shot and we did a single 4K texture you might get a very similar result but the the plus of this thing the big uh like Advantage is that we can make this very cool closeups like let's say right around here and if we render now we're going to be able to really see all of the detail all of the scratches all of the roughness like all of the things that we've created are going to be seen at this particular point so hopefully this answers not only the the question of what EMS are but someone on the last portfolio review which by the way our new portfolio review is available in case you want to participate in October but on the last one they were asking like I've seen some renders that look really really really nice what is it probably udm they probably use quite a bit of texture resolution to make sure all of their materials and all of their elements were looking as nice as possible so yeah this is it my friends I know it's a little bit of a tech technical topic it's not used everywhere but it's really powerful it's especially used you're going to see this a lot in big elements so imagine you are watching a movie and you're watching like this huge like Mecca or whatever like huge robot in Pacific rain they're probably going to be using un because when you have the actor by the side of the robot you don't want parts of the armor to look pixelated so you're going to have like ridiculous amount of texture resolution to make sure they look as nice as possible hopefully this tip looks or works for you my friends and I might be doing another video soon about this Canon showing you some other tips and techniques that we can use inside of substance painter to really utilize all of the information that we have in our GMS if that's something that you guys are interested in let me know in the comments please and if you manag to get all the way to the end of the video thank you very much for your support we're really close to our next goal so your subscription your like your share all of that is really really helpful for us and thank you again for being part of this amazing Community don't forget to join our Discord and I'll be seeing you back very very soon bye-bye

Channel: Abe Leal 3D

Views: 16,381

Keywords: UDIMs explained, UDIM workflow tutorial, 3D texturing with UDIMs, understanding UDIMs in 3D, UDIM techniques, texture mapping with UDIMs, UDIM application guide, advanced UDIM texturing, UDIMs in 3D software, full UDIM tutorial, mastering UDIM workflow, UDIM texture layout, using UDIMs effectively, UDIM guide for beginners, UDIM texturing methods, practical UDIM application, 3D UDIM techniques, digital art UDIM tips, abe leal 3d, abraham leal, what is UDIM, what are UDIMS

Id: -7_EIwMrRuM

Length: 25min 26sec (1526 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2023