UV Mapping - The Easy Way by Ziv Qual, Israel


Relaxing and Final Adjustments

When you first applied the planar map and then lifted, it seemed like there are allmost no stretches but there are! Becuase anything that isnt exactly infront of the plane will have a little streching. This part will show you why DUV is such a powerfull tool. the next step will be to select all the points again, and hit “Relax”. look at the magic! you now suddenly see the checkers become even squares and the stretching allmost completly dissapears.

Note that you got some control over how the relaxing works, and its often good to try it with different area grid values until u are satisfied with the result.

By now your model should be left with very minor SEAMS, STRETCHES and OVERLAPS, and this process should have taken you less than 5 minutes!

You are now 80% done, this is the part where you fix by hand local problams and cut and rejoin points according to how you plan on texturing your model. This is the part that i recommend doing back in your 3d program. Note that, DUV offers some more powerfull features such as soft selecting points and relaxing local areas.



UV Snapshot and Texturing

Thats it. you are done! Now it’s time for the much more fun part of texturing your model. But how can you tell which part of your texture goes to which part on the model ?

For this you need to take a UV snapshot. I’d recommend making the wires white and the backround black, that way you can always use it as the top layer in photoshop (or any other 2d prog) with Screen blending mode. for MAX users, i also recommend a freeware plugin called TEXPORTER. It can take a uv snapshot in a more graphical way which sometimes can help when painting your texture.

Thats it! in this tutorial I’ve demonstrated how simple and fast UVmapping can be. You might say: “Of course its easy! you just mapped a hand ... not a complex model”. Mapping a complex model requires one more step before starting and its to break your model into several parts.

This process is a bit different in every 3D program so i won’t go into details. But just note that this is the step that let you determine where the seams will be. After this process, you will need to map each part seperately pretty much the same way as explained above. I hope this tutorial was helpfull for you.





This tutorial was first published in the CGArena Free PDF Magazine April 06 Issue. Download your copy now

Related Links

Author's Website: www.zivcg.com