Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll talk a little bit about UVs and why they're needed when we add textures. So, UVs are basically just our 3D object flattened out into a 2D space so that we can apply flat textures to them. So, fortunately, a lot of the objects that we have, when we create those in 3ds Max, they're going to come in with their own UVs. To be able to look at those UVs, let's for instance, take this outer part of the engine, we can add a modifier to the stack, and let's add an unwrap UVW to the stack. And we'll just go into, under the Parameters Rollout, go into Edit. This will allow us to open up the edit UVWs window and see the actual UVs themselves. Right now there's a checkerboard pattern in the background. If we'd like to turn that off, we can just go ahead and turn off Show Map. Now, this box right here is basically where our texture is going to be. So you can see that we actually have corresponding sub-objects here in our edit UVW window. They correspond one-to-one with the sub-objects in our 3D viewport. So that if we select some of the points here, you can see the corresponding points on the object. So what this is basically just this object flattened out onto this 2D space, so that whatever texture we define, so if we have some color here, it's going to be applied to those corresponding polygons. You can see that this process involves cutting the object, so that there is actually a seam on one of the sides so that we can actually unwrap that. That's one of things to be aware of. Whenever we unwrap our geometry, there are going to be seams in certain areas. So the idea is to be able to hide those seams, minimize those seams. We also can introduce distortion if we start moving some of these points. So the polygons really should match as closely as possible with the shape of the polygons in our seam so that we can get minimal distortion. But for the most part, we want to keep our UVs inside this sort of zero to one texture space area in here. But the textures will often tile, so we can move those over if we need to do that. So we can look at that in our unwrap UV modifier. We can also just add some simple mapping. If we wanted to go in and use the UVW map, so this is just the UVW mapping. This will allow us to use different projection methods to create the UVs. So you can see this is plane unwrap-- this is projecting our UVs based on a single plane. We have cylindrical map, so that, obviously, would work more for objects like this where we've got a cylindrical shape. If we add a unwrap UVW above that, we can kind of see how that mapping is affecting our UVs, which in this case isn't really helping too much. So we can also, we can do a shrink wrap, spherical map. So all of these different types of mapping techniques are different ways of getting a basic UV layout. So that's if you don't want to edit the UVS, or if you want to just get a good starting point for our UVs. And you can change the size of the projection here, to encompass the object a little bit more. So we're looking at projecting the UVs from the different sides of the cube here. So that if we, again, go in and take a look at our UVs, you can see that that is a completely different look, and probably not something that's going to be useful for us. So, I think in this case, the default UVs for our object seem to be working well. Let's say that we have an object, though, that we want to edit the UVs on. So let's say we've got our little cockpit here and we want to paint a map for this. And so I want to get some nice UVs for this. So I'm going to go ahead and actually get rid of the turbo smooth. Let's add our unwrap UVW modifier, because I want to go ahead and just edit those UVs, and I don't want to do any initial mapping to that. So I'm going to go ahead and just say edit. And right now we've got the checker pattern on. If you had a texture applied, you could also view that texture in here, which we don't, so I'll go ahead and turn that off. So right now we've got all the UVs in here, and you can see there's not really much of a correlation between this and the shape that we've ended up with, because we've done a lot of work to this in modifying the shape. And that work isn't reflected in the UVs. One of the ways that we can just quickly break out our UVs is to just go ahead and say-- let's actually grab, under the UVs, let's grab the faces. We'll go to mapping, and let's just do a flat mapping. I'm going to leave the settings at default. And so that's just going to break everything out into these separate pieces. And you can see here the seams that have been created. So what we want to do is minimize those seams and attach the different pieces together, so that we get something that makes a little sense. So I usually like to start with the middle piece here, and I want to grab this, and I want to select the entire element. So I'm going to choose that little check box. And now I can grab one point on this, and it'll grab the entire element. Now, I want to start to sew up, stitch together, these seams on the side. So for that I'm going to go to an edge selection, turn off select element. And if we start selecting edges, along the line that we want to stitch together, you can see corresponding selection is created over here on this side. This is telling us this is the piece that should be really attached here. So if I select all of these edges, and then go up to Tools, Stitch Selected, that's going to move that piece over and stitch it together. Say OK to that. And now you can see that there's no seam there. The seam is gone, so we get a nice, smooth shape there that we can paint on. Let's do the same thing on the other side. I'll just select those edges. We'll be able to see the corresponding edges here, right up there. Let's go to Tools, Stitch Selected. Say OK to that. And now we're starting to sew everything together. We've got the bottom piece, which if we want to connect that, we could, but we can't connect both sides because then we'd have a complete circle, and we need to have it be able to unfold properly. So I'm just going to go ahead and leave those the way they are. But we do have some pieces over here, for instance, this piece, right in here. Now that's going to be the inside, so we can go ahead and just take our edges and just start to-- you can see where we've got a bunch of different pieces here-- start to sew these together. You can do the same thing over here. Take away our element selection, that is. And let's just start to stitch those. Do the same thing over here. And I just want to select that whole thing. And you can see how we're starting to eliminate a lot of the seams that we have there, and we're starting to get the number of elements that we have, kind of dial those down a little bit. Now, the front part, where we want to have the grill, we want that to be separate. So I'm going to actually take those elements, so this is one of them, and I'm going to move this off to the side. Let's grab this one as well. And so we'll just grab both of these, and these are both of the elements that are basically just the blue part. I want to make sure that we've got all those faces associated with it, and I think we do. And then we have some miscellaneous pieces in here, which we can come in and start to modify. This piece is going to be on the inside here so that we can start to connect this together a little bit. You can see that that's going to go right on the side. And say OK that. Then we'll do this one as well. Say OK to that. You can see here we've got the green lines, which we could go ahead and just stitch. OK, that's telling us we've got open lines there. And just now start to organize things a little bit. So you may have some of these little pieces. You can connect those up, or you don't really need those if they're not really visible. You can just sort of organize those a little bit. So the idea is to compact everything in as much as possible so that you have as much area for your pixels as possible. So, if you have something that's on a very small area of your texture, you're not going to have a lot of pixels to work with, as far as creating those textures. So now we want to arrange everything in this box, making sure that we have everything large enough to be able to paint on. So this is going to be our major piece here. Let's actually select this piece. And I just want to match up the polygons and make sure that they're matched up with the size in here. So I'm going to go to Relax. I'm going to choose to relax by face angles. Start Relax, and then I can stop it. You can see how it just cleans everything up a little bit. Kind of smooths it out, so that's our texture will look a little bit better. So now I can just drop everything in here. I just want to squeeze it in, leaving a little bit of room on the border. I don't want it to go right up against the border. I want to have a little bit of space there. And now, I can start to come in here. And on some of these little pieces, if you want to try to connect those up, you can. I know I'm not going to do too much texture work up here on this, so I'm not going to spend too much time on that. But I just want to come in and just move these things around a little bit so that they make a little bit more sense. And again, ideally, you'd want to squeeze everything you could into this little area. But what I want to do is actually take these two pieces, and I want to make these, since they're part of a different material, I'm going to actually scale these up. So I just hit R. I can just scale these up, and move these out, and I just want to make sure that they're going to fit within that texture space, a tile. So I'll just bring those in and now I'll smooth these over a little bit. So now once we're done, we can leave that UV modifier on there, and you can see how those seams look. So if you want to clean up some of that, you can. If you delete or collapse the stack, all of those UVs, the UV information will be saved into the model. So, if we go ahead and collapse this stack, say yes. Now, we don't have the ability to look at our UVs until we add another modifier. But if we do that, you can see that all of that UV work that we did has been saved. So you can either keep your UV, unwrap UVW modifier, or you can collapse that stack and all that information will be baked down. So, experiment a little with that. I know that we're going to be doing some painting on this, so that's why I used this particular piece, but there may be other pieces that you want to do a little experimenting on, as far as the UV work, or you can at least look at the UVs with our modifier. Now, if you want to get more in-depth into working with UVs in 3ds Max, we do have a course on getting started with UVs in Max. So, I encourage you to check that out if you want to get more in-depth. So, the next thing that we want to do is taking a look at adding external textures. Up to this point we've been using built-in materials, we've been using procedural maps to get parts of our model textured. In the next lesson, let's look at bringing in external images and textures to be able to use and integrate those into our object. So let's go ahead and do that next.