Clear and Detailed UVW Unwrap Tutorial

[EvoG]

Well, if I assume from your website, you are still using 3DSMax ( oops I just reread your post...you're using GMAX...then I'm not sure I can help, you'll have to tell me if it has the UV Unwrap modifier or not...soryy :) ).

The easiest way for you to ever do UV's is to grab your mesh ( I prefer Editable Poly over Mesh ), and toss a UV Unwrap modifier. Immediately go to sub-object 'select face' and the open the EDIT window.

What you are going to do next is what you will do over and over again until you're done :

With 'select face' activated and the edit window open, start to select the faces on your mesh that share a relative normals facing to eachother; for example, select all the faces that make up the entirety of the 'front' of the torso, then hit 'planar map' in the unwrap modifier rollout. You will see the faces you selected in the Edit window for unwrap, and it will look roughly like that piece of the torso you just mapped. Grab that whole piece in the Edit window, scale it down a bit and just shove it to the side of the main window, as you'll place all the UV 'pieces' in the main area AFTER you have uv's on every part of you character. Repeat for each section of the character until you've UV'd the whole.

That was the technical instruction for creating UV's. Artistically, you're interested in trying to keep seams down to a minimum ( in my example above, once you've unwrapped the front, rear and sides of the torso, you would try to stitch them back together so you end up with the whole torso unfolded with only one seam; you can go only so far in stitching your model back together so keep that in mind...common pieces kept seperate but still stitchable to itself are arms, legs, torso and head, and of course all the ancillary parts; also try to keep your seams to the 'insides' of a surface, such as the side of the torso or the underside of the arm. ). You also want to keep a relatively equal 'texel'(texture-pixel) size across the model. A good way to judge this is to put a 'uv test' material on the model before you being UV'ing. The simplest form of the UV test map is a colored checkerboard that you can make in Photoshop. With this map on you character, as you UV, you'll be able to see immediately where you need to increase or decrease the scale of any UV piece in the edit window by comparing the size of the colored checkers displayed on the character. Try to maintain equal sized checkers across all the UV pieces, so when you finish your character, it appears that a nice checker pattern has been laid over the entire character...no checkered area should be any larger or smaller than the whole. Also you'll be doing lots of vertice pushing on the UV pieces in the Unwrap Edit window to reduce texture shearing to to give a poly more or less texture real estate.

As for painting, if you don't have DeepPaint3D for example to help with getting models in and out of DP3D and Photoshop, you can get plugins for max ( again not sure about GMAX ) that will render out your UV wireframe for you so you can go into Photoshop, create a new layer, and paint on that new layer using the wireframe UV's as a guide. ( Texporter is one good plug for this )

This being text can make it very difficult to grasp, but its the best I can offer quickly.

If you have any more questions, be specific and I should be able to help.

Cheers.

[SPyDeR WeBz]

http://welbot.8m.com/UVtut/

Hope it helps.

Cya SPyDeR

[mattregnier]

Thanks for the replies guys, I'm still getting hungup on what i do once i have the uvs layed out though. Am I just supposed to use the print screen button and then paste it into photoshop and paint on it? or is there something I do from the Uvw unwrap editor to make it work ?

[ElysiumGX]

The print screen method works...that's what I use since I'm also a Gmax user. Simply make sure you have the correct image dimensions (crop the image to only show the square containing the UV's, add a texture, then apply the image to the model.

Another Gmax way is to grab Npherno's MD3 viewer (assuming you know how to export MD3's from Gmax), open the model and export the skinbase. That will give you a nice bitmap image with the model's UV mapping. Resize the image to any dimension you prefer and start painting.

Npherno's MD3 viewer is great for images of your models, and good for watching your progress as you skin a model.

Most 3DS max plugins do not work with Gmax.

[Budski]

There's nothing more frustrating than building a model and not being able to texture it because you're not sure how to unwrap it. We've all been there.

A major breakthrough for me was the video tutorial by Wolf Blade that you can download from http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/cottages/zedaxis/

Check out the 'learning' link. On the same page, there's also a direct link to an equally important UV mapping article by Rorshach.

Armed with these 2 tutorials, you'll unwrapping in your sleep.

[mattregnier]

Ely-
thx for the info man, I d/l'd it and it seems to work

Bud-
links rock dude, I'm d/l'ing the video files now, hopefully that'll work, i'm way more of a visual learner than text based and vid files help mucho!

[Donnie_Darko]

no that text expl. really told u how to do it all. thank you.

[Budski]

Glad to be of assistance Matt.

That vid is a big file but it's worth it. I still had to watch it about a 100 times for it all to sink in though. There's also a vid of a guy unwrapping a low poly toilet somewhere as well. I'll post the address if I find the link. Yes, he was indeed unwrapping a toilet :)

Once you understand the mechanics of unwrapping, it's well worth reading Rorschach's lowdown on what makes for good and bad mapping and just how much work you can save yourself when it comes to actually painting on the map.

But check out
http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~polycount/ubb/Forum8/HTML/000644.html There's many a tutorial here and a useful one that describes the difference between the UVW Map modifier and the Unwrap UVW modifier.

[Torm3nt]

Originally posted by Budski
There's nothing more frustrating than building a model and not being able to texture it because you're not sure how to unwrap it. We've all been there.

A major breakthrough for me was the video tutorial by Wolf Blade that you can download from http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/cottages/zedaxis/

Check out the 'learning' link. On the same page, there's also a direct link to an equally important UV mapping article by Rorshach.

Armed with these 2 tutorials, you'll unwrapping in your sleep.
I'm stuck atm as well - but this link is not available.

Also ely - I don't know how to export in md3 format from GMAX, so could you help me out here? Thanks. Very very new at all this, but keen to give it a shot. Thanks guys :)

[twindragon]

I wish that video link would work too I would love to see that tutorial. My unwrapping skills aren't the greatest in teh world neither.

[Short_Fuse]

You guys can try my tutorial if you want. I wrote it for noobs with heaps of explanation along the way. Its for unwrapping a Beretta 92FS low polyish :)

UVW Tutorial (http://chaos.waveartists.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=282)

[BlackGas]

I'm a noob!

Definately going to give your tutorial a go Short_Fuse on my LR-300ML, once I have finally finished with the modeling. :)

[Lee3dee]

Here's a tutorial I found. The voice english is a little difficult to understand sometimes, but the visuals and concepts are the same. I found it very helpful, because the same idea work for characters too.

http://unreal-dl.ellipse.net:8081/unrealcodex/BMC/video_tutorials/uvw_unwrapping.html

Hope that helps everyone. Im trying to find another tutorial that I used to learn Max's unwrap. I have alot of links to go through ;)

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.