There's gotta' be a better way to UV map

[Fungusmonkey]

I just use Menithings technique where you create a morph, seperate the model into sections, rotate, morph and smooth them until they lay out flat in the viewport and then make planar UV projections of them. Once you get used to it, you can get pretty fast at it. Then, all you have to do is delete the morph after you have your UV's and merge the points back together.

[oxygen_77]

I just use Menithings technique where you create a morph, seperate the model into sections, rotate, morph and smooth them until they lay out flat in the viewport and then make planar UV projections of them. Once you get used to it, you can get pretty fast at it. Then, all you have to do is delete the morph after you have your UV's and merge the points back together.
Yeah, I've tried that way and it still seems to take too long and get too difficult when dealing with high poly models... Thanks anyway though...

[essencedesign]

Patience is the key my friend...in true Yoda fasion.. :argh: ...really though, just budget out the time it takes, and be ready for the work, just like modeling...you could try to take your models into another program, I think Z-Brush as some nice mapping tools.

I'm not to sure about the mapping upgrades in the latest LW, as I don't have the upgrade yet.....

Good luck..

[SplineGod]

Any tool that gives you vertex level control is going to potentially take longer. You dont always have to use UV maps. Even if you do use UV maps it doesnt mean you have to adjust evey single point - just the ones that need it. Its also better to use a mesh thats as low rez as you can manage for UV mapping because of the fact that the more points you have the longer it potentially takes. You can also break maps up into more logical areas that are more workable.

With UV mapping there really are no projections. UV maps are 2D only. The idea behind UV maps is that you want to be able to 'flatten' your geometry so you dont get smearing or overlapping polys. Imagine taking a model and flatteniing it so that every vertex is at 0 on the z axis. That essentially what UV maps do. This means youll have to manually pull the geometry out from behind the geometry in front since the texture will project right thru. This is the flattening process I mentioned. What those projections do is help you to flatten or uwrap the geometry faster then doing it all by hand. So if you have an object thats more or less cyclindrical shaped youll use a cylindrical projection to help you to get within 80% or so in order to only have to do the last 20% of the flattening or unwrapping by hand.

To be honest I dont use that morph technique because its redundant. You have to flatten your UVs and using an endormorph isnt really saving you any of the work. Its just another way of doing what you have to do already. Its also the way that texture mapping was done years ago when LW didnt have UV mapping. The UV mapping tools right now are actually very good. Other ways you might look at are using weight maps as alpha maps or regular alpha maps to blend between texture layers. This works well with standard texture (non uv mapping) techniques. Regardless of how you do it you just need to be clever about hiding any potential seams (like using wrinkles etc).

I would also recommend taking a look at a free plugin called UV Chalk. The more you can make your image maps conform to your UV maps this less vertex tweaking youll need to do. :)

[oxygen_77]

Any tool that gives you vertex level control is going to potentially take longer. You dont always have to use UV maps. Even if you do use UV maps it doesnt mean you have to adjust evey single point - just the ones that need it. Its also better to use a mesh thats as low rez as you can manage for UV mapping because of the fact that the more points you have the longer it potentially takes. You can also break maps up into more logical areas that are more workable.

With UV mapping there really are no projections. UV maps are 2D only. The idea behind UV maps is that you want to be able to 'flatten' your geometry so you dont get smearing or overlapping polys. Imagine taking a model and flatteniing it so that every vertex is at 0 on the z axis. That essentially what UV maps do. This means youll have to manually pull the geometry out from behind the geometry in front since the texture will project right thru. This is the flattening process I mentioned. What those projections do is help you to flatten or uwrap the geometry faster then doing it all by hand. So if you have an object thats more or less cyclindrical shaped youll use a cylindrical projection to help you to get within 80% or so in order to only have to do the last 20% of the flattening or unwrapping by hand.

To be honest I dont use that morph technique because its redundant. You have to flatten your UVs and using an endormorph isnt really saving you any of the work. Its just another way of doing what you have to do already. Its also the way that texture mapping was done years ago when LW didnt have UV mapping. The UV mapping tools right now are actually very good. Other ways you might look at are using weight maps as alpha maps or regular alpha maps to blend between texture layers. This works well with standard texture (non uv mapping) techniques. Regardless of how you do it you just need to be clever about hiding any potential seams (like using wrinkles etc).

I would also recommend taking a look at a free plugin called UV Chalk. The more you can make your image maps conform to your UV maps this less vertex tweaking youll need to do. :)
ok, can we say "too much info." hahahaha... Thanks for trying to help, but honestly alot of what you said seemed to be aimed at someone who had never used UV's... I've used them enough to know that the standard Lightwave UV tools aren't very user friendly. I remember seeing something about a year ago where someone was able to create basic shapes that defined how the model was broken up and UV'ed. For example, you could create a box around the torso and cylinder's around the arms and a sphere around the head and more cylinders around the legs, etc. Then this program would use these shapes to give you a nice even UV map for the model. Any plugins for Lightwave that work that way would be great! I was hoping someone would've known of a way to do something similar to that program in Lightwave without needing any plugins. I suppose I'll just have to go back to breaking up the model and then trying to get my UV's to map correctly. I just wish Lightwave wouldn't streach the UV's when you map the poly's. I hate having to try and resize my UV's to reduce streaching that happened just because Lightwave wanted to fill the UV space.

[Fasty]

...To be honest I dont use that morph technique because its redundant. You have to flatten your UVs and using an endormorph isnt really saving you any of the work. Its just another way of doing what you have to do already... ...The UV mapping tools right now are actually very good...


Well at least when using the endomorph technique you can use ALL of Lightwave's modifying tools (eg: Taper), and how about some proper Symmetry action? Or does symmetry work for UV's in 8?

[SplineGod]

Oxygen,
Sorry! I never assume anyone knows anything...its easier that way :)
Anyways, you probably want to use the texture guide tool in modeler or even better
The Texture guide II tool from Lynx. http://lynx.aspect-design.de/plugins/texguide2_info.htm

Fasty,
Theres a lot of free UV tools for LW. Including ones for symmetry I believe. If you do a search in the plugins area on flay with the keyword UV youll see what I mean. :)

[Fasty]

Yeah there are and I use them, but you have to apply them after the fact and they are tedious. It would be much easier if symmetry worked over the middle of the UV like it does over 0 on the x axis.

[oxygen_77]

Oxygen,
Sorry! I never assume anyone knows anything...its easier that way :)
Anyways, you probably want to use the texture guide tool in modeler or even better
The Texture guide II tool from Lynx. http://lynx.aspect-design.de/plugins/texguide2_info.htm

Fasty,
Theres a lot of free UV tools for LW. Including ones for symmetry I believe. If you do a search in the plugins area on flay with the keyword UV youll see what I mean. :)
Thanks man... I appreciate your help!

[el_diablo]

Well you could always use Wings3d to do the basic UV mapping and then push/pull it in Modeler. I cant think of any faster way to do explicit UV mapping since LSCM/Normal projection mapping in wings3d does pretty good job for starters with least amount of work and you can fix /layout it in Modeler in minutes.

Hippo is pretty complex organic model and on the right you can see what wings3d implementation of LSCM does with it with just centerline cut. Legs and other big changes in topology flow should be cut speratly for better results tho.

[TheGreatRaja]

if you want to learn UV mapping go here
http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/LightwaveTuts/LWTutSet.html

just click on UV map. and there are several tutorials that walk you throught it

[toonafish]

I have to disagree there god ;-) , by using a morph to create UV's you can use tools like symmetry and smooting which works a bit like a relax-uv's.

For those of you who use morphs to create UV's, try "FI's_UV2Poly" ( check Flay) . With this one you can convert your UV's to a morph so you can switch back and forth between the 2. This way you can use the Texture guide to unwrap your model and continue by tweaking geometry instead of UV's.



To be honest I dont use that morph technique because its redundant. You have to flatten your UVs and using an endormorph isnt really saving you any of the work. Its just another way of doing what you have to do already. Its also the way that texture mapping was done years ago when LW didnt have UV mapping. The UV mapping tools right now are actually very good. Other ways you might look at are using weight maps as alpha maps or regular alpha maps to blend between texture layers. This works well with standard texture (non uv mapping) techniques. Regardless of how you do it you just need to be clever about hiding any potential seams (like using wrinkles etc).

I would also recommend taking a look at a free plugin called UV Chalk. The more you can make your image maps conform to your UV maps this less vertex tweaking youll need to do. :)

[Aegis Prime]

I highly recommend ResPower's Super/UV plugin for LightWave - it makes unwrapping UV's a snap - combine that with 8.2's UV tweaks and you can get a lot done very quickly...

www.respower.com

[Mattoo]

I've used 3ds MAX and Maya day in day out and I can't honestly describe Lightwaves UV mapping method terribly worse than either of those - in just as many respects I actually prefer it.

[oxygen_77]

I highly recommend ResPower's Super/UV plugin for LightWave - it makes unwrapping UV's a snap - combine that with 8.2's UV tweaks and you can get a lot done very quickly...

www.respower.com (http://www.respower.com)
I wouldn't even try this program for the simple fact that in their description of how it works they only UV map a Cube... That has to be one of the easiest things to map... If it was really so great you would think they could UV map something more complex like a high-poly, non-uniform person or somthing.

[oxygen_77]

Well you could always use Wings3d to do the basic UV mapping and then push/pull it in Modeler. I cant think of any faster way to do explicit UV mapping since LSCM/Normal projection mapping in wings3d does pretty good job for starters with least amount of work and you can fix /layout it in Modeler in minutes.

Hippo is pretty complex organic model and on the right you can see what wings3d implementation of LSCM does with it with just centerline cut. Legs and other big changes in topology flow should be cut speratly for better results tho.
Ok, this seems like a good idea, but I can't really tell which end of the LSCM projection is the head and which is the tail... That's a pretty bad thing when it comes to UV's because then you have to spend lots of time resizing the streached areas to get a clean map. I'll check into this though... It could help..

[el_diablo]

You have bad overview of the model becouse all is one piece. eg. the leftmost part is the interior of the mouth. So its silly way to unwrap, but even this 5 click version is enough to be used in 3d paint proggie with minimal stretching.

Well that image was 5 click project.
1. Import .obj
2. body mode
3. uv mapping from menu
4. select an edge and press L (loop)
5. unwrap

that was about it

Best way to keep uv parts silluette is to do Normal projection unwraping after segmenting the model and then fix some or all of the border vertices you want to freeze in space and then do unfold. that way you keep the silluette reasonable and rest of faces unwrap so they minimize stretching. After that do a stretch optimization function. Thats about it.

You get about this in 5 mins or so.

[Aegis Prime]

I wouldn't even try this program for the simple fact that in their description of how it works they only UV map a Cube... That has to be one of the easiest things to map... If it was really so great you would think they could UV map something more complex like a high-poly, non-uniform person or somthing.

Suit yourself - whilst I'll admit that their tutorial doesn't really show what you can do with Super/UV,

a.) It's free to try and most of its tools are free to use after the trial period.

b.) It works amazingly well with LightWave's extended selections (Shift+]) - I've unwrapped complex geometry with zero distortion in seconds with this plugin - quite literally it's saved me hours (if not days) of work...

Still, each to their own eh?

[Larrikin]

...you could try to take your models into another program, I think Z-Brush as some nice mapping tools.


Yeah Zbrush is great. If you want to paint directly onto the model and never look at a UV map again use that. High poly counts are no probs either.

[mav3rick]

texture guide 2 from lynx lack support for subpatch uv map mode in 8.2

[evan]

Most if not all objects can be broken down into reasonably easy sections for UV mapping. Combined with morphing and the use of a "checker" image or something similar it doesn't take too much effort to create distortion free UV maps even on high res. models.

Evan

[toonafish]

texture guide 2 from lynx lack support for subpatch uv map mode in 8.2

Huh ?? you can set the UV's to subpatch after creating them with any tool in the vertexmaps window. Just like the color of the UVmap. Some tools like UV-spider are not completely compattible with the new UV options, but I've noticed that an old fashioned unweld>merge will fix this.

[leigh]

I've used 3ds MAX and Maya day in day out and I can't honestly describe Lightwaves UV mapping method terribly worse than either of those - in just as many respects I actually prefer it.

I tend to agree, especially in the case of Max, which has a terrible UV toolset, in my opinion. My personal favourite UV toolset is in XSI, followed closely by LightWave. What I like about LightWave's toolset is its simplicity.

I actually spent most of today UV mapping.

I honestly believe that people over-complicate the process for themselves. UV mapping is essentially very simple - it simply provides you with a sampled version of your vertices for texture placement. Of course tweaking is a pain, but it's not difficult. Just very tedious at times.

And while programs like ZBrush and BodyPaint supply you with an alternative to this, personally I have always enjoyed the freedom to paint in a 2D package, for which you need UV maps that aren't a massive fractured mess. Of course painting in 2D or 3D is really a personal preference though :)

[oxygen_77]

I just wanted to say thanks to all of you who provided helpfull responses. I have a lot of new ways to try which is what I was hoping for...

Thanks!:thumbsup:

[mav3rick]

sorry my bad:)

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