ZEN UV addon for Blender - overview and tutorial

hey guys you're here with night of it for blender this one's going to be about uv unwrapping we're going to be talking about zen uv add-on which is the ultimate add-on for this purpose now zenyu v works in tandem with uv pack master pro 2. so if you want the best algorithm for unpacking i suggest you get uv puck master 2 as well xenu v actually allows you to use it algorithm and i'm gonna talk about it in a while now zenyuvi was created by people who are into gaming industry and that's how the you know that's how they make their living they're just simply professional game artists and the lead developer over there is sergey tiapkin who's a phenomenal artist you can see his art on art station i think he's extremely talented and you know they needed tool to get the job done as quickly as possible and also as efficiently as possible and that's zen uv so if you are into game assets and this is your thing and you're gonna be doing it you know um on a daily basis or you just uh don't really like uv unwrapping and you find it boring zen uv's probably for you because let me tell you this addon is amazing now this addon was also used by me in the course in the original game as of course by blender bros i was using zen uv and uv pack master 2. granted i was using only to talk about td so texel density which we're gonna be talking about a bit later today but you know it's a bit like using ferrari to go to get some eggs in the grocery shop because nuv is an extremely powerful add-on i just wanted to do it justice and talk about it in depth today now links to the add-on to blend the market and gum road stores are in the video description so if you want to grab that add-on hop on the links the affiliate links so if you go through the links you're going to help me as well which is great i appreciate it now let me tell you how to use this thing because a lot of people actually misuse this and you know people can be factory documentation that includes me so i was lucky enough to have two hours plus with sergey and he explained me everything and so i was blown the hell away because when i saw the potential sorry dude that is off the charts probably not gonna be discussing everything because it's just too much but i will tell you how to use it to literally its full potential and i'll tell you about other features that are a bit more advanced that like i said we're not going to be discussing today for example from the top you got advanced uv maps which is basically for dual uv channels or multiple uv channels so if you in that kind of you know into that kind of thing this is for you second option here would be for seam groups which is a bit like vertex groups so you could create scene groups and sort of select groups of seams with one click which is extremely convenient for more complex projects we don't need this in here because you know just simple items by the way it's a zen uv add-on mascot which i received from sergey to demonstrate the add-on so um you know we we don't really need that here but you have this option which i think is phenomenal it's a bit like the vertex group um option in mesh machine when you can you know transfer uvs or like i said vertex groups here in blender so a similar stuff right these actually are the main windows so you got the unwrap the select pack checker and textile density these are really important and you know you're going to spend majority of your time here in addition to all this you have a pie menu so if you're not into menus like this you can use pie menu which is alt u by default i remapped it to alt q and you got a pie menu from zen uv and so you can use it you know if you want to get quantification unwrapping isolation mark and all the most important tools here which i think is bloody brilliant also just like in hard ups or box cutter or other add-ons you can access the sub menu by simply clicking alt control or whatever you if you hover over them and it will tell you what options what other options you know you have here so for example if you want to unwrap and pack at the same time you simply click on zen uv unwrap without and this is what's going to happen you know and some of these menus simply offer you additional options so you know have a look at that one right you can change the key maps you know here so there's direct access to your preferences i think it's very convenient in addition to all this you got hard ups integration which basically makes this uv window here redundant because you know if i'm going to i'll show you this in a minute there's going to be like a window popping up in here so let me just show you on a very simple cube because i don't actually mess up this model at the moment let me turn off this gizmo here so if i'm going to have this option selected at the um hardup's uv display if i'm going to you know go to alt alt q and z and wrap you see that we actually have as you know the same window being displayed here so this is a drop window right so you don't really need this meaning you have more space you know more real estate to actually work on your object and zenyuv unlike most of the um uv related add-ons works not only just in n-panel in the uv window but also in the end panel on the main window and that's and you know that's really important because like i said especially now with this hard ops integration you really don't need this thing here so you can just work and you know in this window here right but again you know um we're going to be using that window here because it's going to be a bit easier to see for you know people who are just getting into this um uv unwrapping malloc here so to start unwrapping what you need to do is select an object and go to edit mode which will basically display more options in here you can see that it switches between solid and edit mode also you know you might want to go to uv editing window here so switch from layout to uv editing and it will display here automatically a uv editing window you can resize it here if you want to it's a bit bit too crazy so you want a more real real estate in here and let's go back to zen uv and now how you know how to work this magic right so that you know let's let's talk about it so first of all we're going to mark you know mark seams now how do you mark seams the easiest way to mark seams in hard surface right is by marking them by angle and you have this option here and it's similar to what it what hard ups does so when you go to control until the menu is hard up so you can select what what type of edges you want to apply to all edges that are actually above 30 degrees right so this is very similar you can simply mark by angle and you can choose if you want to mark seams only or you know sharps or just sharps only i don't need sharp so i'm going to uncheck it i'm going to just simply mark on the seams so mark by angle boom now let me show you how to unwrap with any of your unwrap now if you're going to select everything and you know i'll go to pi menu and i'll click on zenyuvian drop which is basically unwrap and pack you'll see you're going to end up with you know a mosaic of a mess because every single island is unpacked separately now in this situation i don't want sharp i just saw on the edges that are actually sharp by angle and then i'm going to simply click zenuvian drop and now you can see that uv unwrap is completely different it's still not ideal but it's completely different and now we're going to be using other tools to actually fix that okay so we got our mesh unwrapped and now we need to fix several problems so for example you can see here that we have overlapping islands meaning we got overlapping faces on top of other faces that's not ideal and that usually indicates that we have some kind of a problem with with seams we need to fix it usually on cylinders like circular elements right so it's a little bit difficult to find these things but with zenyuv is really easy because you can do is simply you can select them by overlapping islands where was it select overlapped islands boom and it's going to highlight all the islands that are overlapping another very cool option here is that once you select it you can isolate these islands to work on them so boom isolate toggle kind of like the control f button in machine tools right you know kind of like a local mode now we can see what the problem is the problem is that you know blender unwraps everything and stretches it because there's no seams um on the bottom right or where you just you know going across the cylinder it's a cylindrical form so to unwrap it you need at least one cut on you know at some point right so let's mark them right and simply zen uv unwrap and that's what you're gonna get now we're still probably gonna have to you know separate this one so we can you know simply click on this edge and um let's select this island market zanuvian rap and boom and now we're gonna have to quadrify some islands right so let's go back to the main view so we're gonna uh go to um isolate islands toggle and now we're going to quadrify islands okay so uh let me just this very quickly right there we go this one um this one this one and this one they all need quantification right so select these and literally press quadrify and you're done right then select everything and park islands now let's talk about this side here because you can see that you know this side here is a little bit of a mess we don't need these seams because they just simply create all these when i select everything here all the z you see they're only in separate spots which is not really ideal because you don't need seams in here so all you really need to do is simply click send and wrap which we're gonna merge it together which is fantastic and you know i'm gonna do the same thing here you can mirror this but you know boom right and salted which is great same here you know zenon wrap and now the cool thing about this add-on is that you can um sort of sort um islands by complete and incomplete so let's say i'm going to select these right this one this one and um well let's say this one right or maybe not this one um yeah these two right and i'm gonna click select islands okay so where was it select islands right and i'm gonna attack them as finished what zenuvi will do it will move them to the right side out of the out of the zen out of the uv space and they will not be you know messed with which is fantastic because it allows you to kind of um visually distinguish between you know finished and unfinished now even better than that you can display finish toggle which will display colors which you can by the way change here and show you visually in in your display um in a viewport which islands are finished and which ones aren't finished so that's fantastic as well and you can of course of course you know toggle it off so toggle right now let's talk about the um let's talk about about checker a little bit this one is related to td which is textile density so let's maybe pack these islands a little bit i'm not going to be doing the proper packing because you know i would need to spend some time actually uv unwrapping this but it's not the point of this video let me just quadrify them really quickly here so quadrify and pack them again boom right so let's talk about textile density now textile density um options are here and they're really important also you have the built-in checker textures which you can change on the fly which is fantastic so you can select different types of checker textures you can load your own you can select different sizes of them depending on what kind of resolution you're working on so let's let's say we're working in 4k so we want 4k resolution td textures right and now how to work this thing well let's say you're going to get a specific td from from your you know from the studio you're working for let's say you're gonna get you know i don't know let's say 250 okay that's your td so you need to set that td to a specific island so let's select an island right and then set td which will you see resize these squares to a proper text density meaning texture resolution and now i need to set that td to the entire model so i'm going to select everything and set td and this will scale up or scale down my islands accordingly okay so let's pack our islands all right so let's pack them and let's see how we're looking now here what you can do you can actually set your td 250 right because it's our target td and you can actually see whether you're you know over or um or below the limit so if i'm gonna click on refresh td you see that my model color has changed what does it mean it means that you need to look at this scale here if you're in the middle a middle section here you equal to the td value that you specified if you're going um towards the red zone which is not very good because meteor resolution is you know is getting smaller and smaller so the texture is going to be more blurry and blurry um you're getting into the red zone meaning you your textile density is actually lower than what you set in here so you basically what you need to do is you need to scale some islands up or down and maybe um you know fix a little bit of the arrangement of islands so we will need to work on this a little bit more to make it more efficient possibly overlay some islands if you wanted to and you know you can use other tools for this and if you want to for instance you know these two islands right they're identical you could technically overlap them you know on top of one another and i think you'll be fine and because you can't see both at the same time right so you know this would probably save a lot of space but um you know that's a little bit outside the scope of this video that's how you do it basically right now you can toggle this texture on and off if you want to if it doesn't work you probably need to purge some orphan data i've noticed that there was some issues with this one so um if it doesn't work for you maybe some orphan data isn't you know is has been displayed here so you might want to remove this but basically you can toggle the texture on and off here you can also remove the textured nodes very easily so if you don't want to see it you know you can remove it uh there is some problem with the orphan data which is why it's still displaying i think let me just get rid of these there you go and let me just go very quickly to shader editor and remove this texture here manually there you go i think now should work properly so viewport and let me just see that there you go toggle on and off so if you have a problem with that just remove your orphan data it's probably some blender blender is messing things up as usual anyway um this section here is really cool it's very compact but it's very powerful what it allows you to do is allows you to to manipulate with islands and i'm just going to show you a few examples because it's just way too much to talk about but let's just grab these islands and let's go we're going to isolate them so we're going to isolate them to see them a little bit better right and i'm going to go back to this alignment tool the first one is basically move so you can move the islands by increments right um and you can search options um you know your options in here you can scale the islands here so you can scale them you know um in this window if you want to there's a rotation so you can rotate them by increments as well now rotation is fantastic because watch this you can actually rotate them um according to the edges which is brilliant and this is very useful for of combating aliasing because when you have you know diagonal islands like this uh you wanna you're gonna end up with some aliasing on lower resolution normal maps so you might to you know use this tool for this one essentially fantastic especially for edges that are running at all angles so brilliant tool and then we have what's next it's a flip so you can flip your islands it's kind of like a mirror thing this flip option could be very useful for for example fixing this issue here so let me select these and then uv unwrap and then with me select these right and this is any of the unwrapped and did it work the way i wanted to wait a minute not really hang on hang on and go hang on so like these and these and zenyuv unwrap right so we got these two z's and let's select them so select islands and let's isolate them and if i'm going to know select island and i'm going to go to flip tool which was here right i can flip this island and now i can align these two so select both then whoa what is it here then select islands and then i'm gonna go to align which is here and boom and you go to line islands you see what i mean so now you know and then when you park in them right so when you when you're parking them if you're gonna use the regular park that's a bad idea because it's gonna you know uh sort of split them but in a uv packmaster i'm not sure if his xenuv has it actually so sergey if you're watching it let me know but um in uv packmaster what you can do is you can lock overlopping islands right so if you go to advanced options you can log overlapping and then when you park it boom see you're getting these two islands pack on top of one another and that's gonna save you a enough space you got some problem here where we can fix this but you know what i mean so that's how you use this tool it's brilliant this is brilliant you know because overlapping manually is a pain us then you have here uh you have fit so you can fit talents this one is cool when you're working for example on you know let's say textures that are actually not squared but they for example you know four by one so like 4k by 1k so you can fit the islands with you know whichever way you want which is fantastic for working on for example you know stuff like buildings and you know or roads or something that's actually very very large in scale all right now let's go out of this isolation mode and let's for example grab some different faces let's grab these faces okay so here and let's actually isolate them again oh um wait a minute wrong key that's the one isolate them again select them all and we're going to pack them so sort of pack them you know so you can use this one this tool for aligning so you can align them together right depending how you want to align them you could align them to a corner to the middle to left top corner etc so this is really useful when you for example using um you know procedural textures which don't really have any details like bsdf or architectures one real engine you don't really give a if the islands overlapping because there's no you know this seamless anyway so you can save a lot of space on your uv uh uv grid by doing that you know by simply aligning islands like this so it's a very useful tool and this one actually is a 2d cursor transform tool so this is in a nutshell all about um as a uv that you should know from the beginning play with the options they're fantastic last thing i'm going to talk to you about is actually this margin which is quite important margin is set in pixels but you can change it if you want to which is a bit more intuitive and that's really important because let's say if you're pocketing the 4k you probably want to go with something around 16 pixels and this will simply allow you to create margin between islands when you're packing them right the same thing is in blender the same thing is in uv pack master too and it's very important because you don't want any bleeding uh you know on textures especially it could be visible in game engine view when viewed from a distance so you know this is very important um feature and it's included in here as well which is brilliant and also uv coverage is also important uh it shows you how much space you're basically wasting you want to be in the range of 80 plus which means it's unwrapping so we need to work on it a little bit more you know to make it a bit more efficient probably overlapping some islands maybe packing them a little bit better so we need to work on this one a bit more yeah but um you know this is very useful because it shows you you know how efficient you are with your space and remember the more efficient you are the higher the higher textile density you're going to have means the higher texture resolution is going to be meaning you can use lower texture resolution in games instead of going 4k you can go 2k if you can park your islands you know very efficiently yeah so anyway guys that's it for this video i think they should cover all the most important features of you know zen uv the add-on is absolutely sensational and has been updated constantly they just dropped a release quite recently which was brilliant and it's actually the recent um edition a added a bit more features to this menu to the packer menu which allow you to actually set texture resolution which is fantastic and you can you know turn an on and off rotation of violence which is also important because sometimes you don't want some islands to be rotated and so this is you know this is a very powerful tool and like i said we use it in our course in our game asset course which is still available at twenty percent discount it's an early bird discount you can get it on gumroad blender market and our website blenderbros.com we by the way enabled streaming on gumroad and also downloading on our website so you can either stream or download on gumroad and blenderbros.com and you can download the course from blendermarket.com so that's your choice link to zen uv in the video description so if you need that add-on and i think if you are into unwrapping or you will be into unwrapping you should definitely get it because i think this add-on is just brilliant now the last but not least is the hard-ups integration which means that you don't really need to you know uh worry much about uv window because you're gonna get it displayed in here so you have more real estate to work with which is bloody amazing so anyway links to hard ups and boxes are in the video description as well grab them as a bundle this is probably the most important package for you as a hard surface modeler so if you want to be efficient and move quickly and ferociously hard ups and box cutter are probably your best bet thanks for watching guys catch you next video

Channel: Ponte Ryuurui

Views: 11,190

Keywords: blender, UV, zenuv, unwrap, game, asset, texel, density, tutorial, 3d, hard, surface, hardops, boxcutter

Id: I3wvUG4A5P0

Length: 23min 49sec (1429 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021