Zbrush UVs: Tutorial - How to: Create UVs - Zbrush Beginner Tutorial - Zbrush uv - UVs in 10 Minutes

hello everyone and welcome back to my youtube channel it's been about four months since i posted a video and that's because i've been working really hard on a skillshare class the video i'm about to show you using uvs and zbrush is actually the final video in my skillshare class so this is sort of a preview of what my class has to offer if you're not familiar with skillshare skillshare is actually a learning platform where creators like you and me can upload videos to teach people how to do specific things like lighting and photography creating a business or in my case learning how to use zbrush if you use the link in the description below you can sign up for 14 days of skillshare absolutely free and if you don't like it you can always cancel at any time if you use the link in the description below it does give me a referral through skillshare which helps me out a little bit but without further ado let's get into uvs and zbrush welcome to step 9. in step 9 we'll be using the earthquake model in the lightbox under projects demo projects and the earthquake model is at the top in this step we're going to talk about uvs and texturing on your model so for people who aren't familiar what exactly are uvs if we zoom in on our object we can see that they've already done a lot of textures and painting on this object really all that this is is just using alphas and nice sculpting to achieve details that look like fabric but if we zoom in really close you can see these are just some basic lines and some paint on the model basically uvs are just a coordinate map that wraps around the outside of your object and tells the program where to put the color and where to put the textures so this object does not have uvs so we need to create some first we need to go to the lowest subdivision level on our object you can do that by hitting shift d or you can slide the slider in the geometry menu down to 1. when you're creating uvs it will only work on the lowest subdivision level now we need to go to our z plugin menu and because we're going to use this a lot i'm going to drag and drop the menu in the divider on the right if we look in the z plugin menu and go down to uv master we can turn on polygroups this is one really efficient way of unwrapping your objects so turn polygroups on and hit unwrap and zbrush will unwrap every polygroup as its own individual uv chunk or island and you'll see what i'm talking about in a minute so now that we've unwrapped our object we're still on our lowest subdivision level so we need to close uv master and we need to go back to the geometry menu and go back up to our highest subdivision level now in order to create a texture with our uvs we scroll down on the tool menu and find texture map and then we can click on new texture then if we click on create we can select new from poly paint and this will create a texture using our uvs of our colors and our details on our object so if i hover over this little thumbnail here of my texture you can actually see the uv islands individually and the way that zbrush unwrapped our object so really all this is is just a preview of an image file and the uvs tell the image file where to go on your object so for those that are not exactly familiar now what are textures textures are just an image file when you're painting on your model than zbrush you're painting directly on the vertices and then when you convert them to a texture zbrush simply turns the colors into an image file and exports them as a jpeg or a png so you are literally just taking a picture and wrapping it around your object the uvs are what tell the picture where to go on your object and the textures are just the colors and surface details converted into an image file if you're creating a character for a video game you have to create uvs for every single sub tool so you have to go through and unwrap every subtool individually we're just going to repeat our process that we did before go to our lowest subdivision level turn polygroups on and uv unwrap each sub tool in our scene then we go back up to our highest subdivision level go down to textures create new texture and then create from poly paint this is actually a better representation of what uvs are supposed to look like because you can actually see the face and the arms and the body and they're all unwrapped as individual uv islands and the reason that i selected unwrap with polygroups is because zbrush separates each polygroup as its own uv island so this simplifies the process quite a bit when you need to export your model you can go to the top of the tool menu and hit the export button now it automatically defaults to an obj file and you can name your file and save it to your computer and it will export whatever your current selection is now i want to export my texture as an image file to do this i need to go to the texture map menu and i need to click on clone texture then if i go over to the left above my material tab is my texture tab and if i click on that my texture should be selected by default if not i can just click on it on the top to select it now at the bottom of this texture menu you can hit export change the name of your file and i like to change the format of my image to png because pngs support transparency and alpha whereas jpegs do not i want to show you the method i was talking about earlier where you combine all your subtools into one with merge visible and combine the uvs first we'll dock our z plugin menu on the right and if we go down the z plugin menu we have transpose master now in transpose master there's t-pose mesh and if you click on this what it does is it takes you to a separate preview of your object with everything at the lowest subdivision level now under z plug-in if we go down to uv master turn on polygroups and click on wrap it will unwrap every single sub tool in your scene this method does take a lot longer zbrush needs time to process every single sub tool and unwrap it individually so it can take a lot of time sometimes it freezes or has errors it's not the most reliable method but when it does work it works really well keep in mind though this doesn't always work if your geometry isn't very sound or if there's something wrong with a topology if there are edges that are overlapping somewhere it will fail and you will not be able to use this method now assuming everything went well and that it unwrapped all of your objects successfully you can close subtool master and go back to transpose master and hit t pose sub t to the right of t pose mesh it will ask if you want to transfer the uvs just hit yes and zbrush will go through and transfer those uvs to every sub tool in your scene if we scroll down on the tool menu we can verify if our object has uvs by opening the uv map menu and because morph uv and delete uv are active that means that this object has uvs so that's a quick way to check now that all of our subtools have uvs we want to go back to the subtool menu go down to merge and we want to turn on uv and then you want to hit merge visible when we scroll to the top you can find your new scene with all your merged subtools we can scroll down to uv and it's got uvs and we can click on texture map new texture and create new from poly paint so this doesn't always work but zbrush did a pretty good job because this is a nicely cleaned up model and it put all of the uv islands for every piece of the character in one uv space as one single image file so we didn't have to have multiple image files for our character we just need one and the beautiful thing about this is now you can just go straight up to export under tool and you can save your file but now you can import this obj file of your earthquake model or your character straight into blender and if you go into rendered view the textures are already applied to your model so this is a really nice way to export your model to blender and get more realistic lighting and rendering if you're familiar with that process that brings us to the end of step 9. now i'm going to show you how i applied these principles to our class project and show you how i unwrapped my dragon character first i had to go back on my character because i realized there was some really bad geometry on the eyeballs and at some point i accidentally merged them together and i just couldn't have that when i was unwrapping it with uvs fortunately i still had my save file with my boolean object for my eyes when i created them so i just went back and recreated the eyes and repainted them now the geometry on these eyeballs was pretty terrible and if i tried to unwrap it like this it would just be a disaster so i instead went and i turned on dynamesh and i cranked the resolution up pretty high because i wanted it to look nice and you can see when i turned on dynamesh it actually still preserved my poly paint which is nice and my active number of points is much higher but in this instance i'm okay with that because it's not going to affect the performance of my computer that much for this kind of unwrap i also did this with the other subtools in my scene because i wanted to ensure that my geometry was nice and even and dynamesh does a good job of evening out the topology on your mesh and it made my unwrap go a lot more smoothly for this particular project my polygroups were not already set up so what i had to do was split things off into their own subtools and then merge visible and then go to poly groups and hit auto groups to separate everything into its own separate polygroup so with all my subtools merged together and my polygroups set up i went up to z plugin went down to uv master turned on polygroups and hit unwrap from this step forward it's a little different so i'll show you what i did first i verify that i have uvs then i go to z plugin go down to uv master and at the bottom you can click on work on clone now this takes you to a separate scene which is kind of a preview of all of your pieces and you can find it in your scenes above your subtool list and now if i go to uv map on the right you can see that my clone has uvs so if i go back to z plugin i want to go down to the bottom and hit copy uvs then i want to navigate back to my original scene with my single sub tool that i had before and if i go back to z plugin again i can go down to the bottom and hit paste uvs this is a necessary step because it doesn't always work if you unwrap your object and then go straight to creating your texture so if you're ever having issues when you merge your subtools together creating uvs try this method now i can go to texture create new texture and create new from polypaint and zbrush created textures out of my poly paint now i can just hit clone texture on the right and go over to the texture menu on the left and hit export and i'll change my file to a png and save my image file as the textures for my dragon and then i can go up to the top of my tool menu and hit export and export my dragon as an obj file in blender i can go to import wavefront obj select my dragon object and you can see here that it's imported my dragon and my textures are good to go i hope that this video wasn't too confusing i know that uvs are kind of a confusing concept especially if you're new to 3d it took me a long time to understand them and kind of understand what to do with them but that brings us to the end of step 9 and by this point i hope that these videos have really helped and given you some kind of foundation to understand what it's like to create a project from beginning to end in the next video i'm going to go over some of the processes that 3d artists and professionals in the industry use for creating their own projects and hopefully it will help you have an idea of what kind of projects you want to start that's gonna do it for this video guys thank you so much for supporting my channel and watching my videos by the way the last time that i posted a video i think i had 400 subscribers i'm up to 900 subscribers now which means people are watching these videos i just want to say i appreciate all your support thank you guys stick around for more videos and tips and tricks in zbrush and i will see you you

Channel: Gatz 3D

Views: 2,786

Rating: 4.965517 out of 5

Keywords: zbrush uvs, zbrush 2021, zbrush tutorial, zbrush beginner tutorial, zbrush uv master, zbrush sculpting, zbrush to blender, zbrush character modeling, uv master, export uvs, create uvs, how to make uvs, how to create uvs, uvs explained, uvs tutorial, tutorial uvs, uv tutorial, tutorial uv, zbrush uv tutorial, zbrush uvs tutorial, uvs how to, how to uvs, how to uv, make uvs, make uv, zbrush uv, uv, uv zbrush, skillshare

Id: fv4nAj8w--8

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021