You need good UV unwrapping of your model for good results. UV mapping is the technique used to 'wrap' a 2D image texture onto a 3D mesh. If you've painted texture maps in the past, you'll know that bad UV mapping coordinates can make the texturing process painful. In this, I'll offer my tips to help. It's best to start with a clean mesh. This means your mesh has been created with all quadrangular faces, and has no extra vertices.
When you're happy with your mesh, you are ready for the next step: UV unwrapping. I use the professional plugin for. It automatically lays out UV co-ordinates and minimises distortion in just a few clicks.
Here's how I do it. Run the plugin Firstly you'll need to run the plugin by typing Roadkill into the Maya MEL editor, and press Enter. Now select your model and check all boxes in Roadkill then press unwrap. Select the model Now it's time to select the model you want your 2D image texture to wrap on to. Press E on the keyboard, or Edge mode-Select (press E) inside Roadkill and drag-select the model to make it live. The Roadkill interface is just like Maya, so Alt+left click will rotate, Alt+middle click will pan and Alt+right click will Zoom. Position your seams It is usually best to place seams where real clothing has seams (where the panels of cloth would be sewn together).
Headus UVLayout. Fracture Voronoi. Ultimate Unwrap 3D. Roadkill UV Tool. Mapping Tools > Sabotage > Computers > Software > 3D Applications > 3D TOOLBOX. Headus UVLayout - Home. Roadkill 1.1 Manual by Andy Swann (please mail me if you spot any errors. GPU Global Illumination Gallery. Roadkill UV maxscript. Roadkill UV maxscript. Roadkill is an excellent tool if you need to unwrap 3D meshes. This script makes working with Max and roadkill much easier and removes the need to manually export / import OBJ meshes between the two applications.
This method is more realistic and it reduces the pain of hiding seams. If the seams are not placed in a realistic location, you will need to make sure you can paint textures in a way that the seams will not be visible. Try to keep UV seams to a minimum and carefully choose where to place them so they are least visible to the viewer. Cut your wrap Once you decide where you want to place the seams just Shift+click to select the edges one by one or double-click the edges. Now press C or Edge mode-Cut select for cutting edges. If you want to be able to stitch the edges back together, select the edge and press W or have Edge mode-Weld selected.
Export the UV Map for texturing You have now finished the UV map, so exit the file (you don't even have to save it). It will now update back in Maya with its new UV. You can then create a snapshot of this map to paint your texture map.
Select PolygonsUV Snapshot and now go and have some fun painting a texture for your 3D model. This article first appeared in issue 187 of magazine.
Hello everybody, I'm a beginner at 3D stuff and in these days it's first time in my life I'm facing the true pain while unwrapping UV. So I'm thinking about perfect auto unwrap program that would make my life much easier to live, but the truth is, there is no such a perfect program. However, what I know there are some programs able to somehow unwrap UV, and here's my question for you, super-pro guys. What is the best program that can automatically unwrap UV? What would you suggest?
Thanks for your answers, this is my first post and I hope it will help me, or somebody else. Again, thank you guys.
The only software I know of that has a one click unwrap solution is ZBrush's. That's fine for projecting tilable patterns onto your high poly mesh or baking out quick maps to utilize within ZBrush, but you're not going to get production quality results with it. I would guess that most of the people around here use the UV tools that ship with Maya or Max, either with or without third-party scripts/add-ons like. The two dedicated UV applications that are most widely used are (which is what I use). I haven't used Unfold, but I've heard it's a solid program. The professional licenses for both Headus and Unfold are $300, but Headus offers hobbyist and student licenses for less cost. TL&DR There is no silver bullet solution that works perfectly for everyone.
Experiment and see which tool you prefer. Actually while we're on the subject, has anyone unwrapped a head like this before? We usually place a seam in the middle of the chin and another one goes up to the tip of the nose.
These two are kinda mountainous areas and would produce too much stretching if not cut. We cut up the rest of the head to maximize UV space usage. Generally a standalone head model has to include the neck down to the level of the clavicles, because facial animation requires access to those areas so we need to include them in blendshapes. Looks sorta like this: Also, movie VFX creatures with larger skin areas are usually unwrapped to a lot of 4K or 2K layouts and some more complex shaders are used to allow easier management of the textures.
This means that the artist only has to load textures for the area that's being painted, and the renderer can also manage data access more efficiently. Seams are also reasonably simple to hide in offline rendering with proper texture painting and render time filtering.
Hey off-topic UV question: is it ok to bring your islands way up to the edges of your image space? I don't see any reason why not, just want to be sure. Usually not good, but depends.
Most materials use the UV mode that wraps when it gets to the edge, so the texture tiles if the UVs go over. This means along the edge it will filter in some of the colors from the opposite side of the texture. So UVs touching the edge can cause seams. If you can change the UV address mode to Clamp instead, then it won't filter the other side, instead it just stretches the edge pixel colors outwards. This is what Clamp mode looks like. Ptex can introduce a lot of technical issues depending on your pipeline.
Starting with simple stuff like changing the model topology - that'd already require you to reproject or re-bake your textures if using Ptex. I also sometimes relied on UVs for some fine adjustments on character faces, where facial wrinkles were refined during the sculpt and texture pass. I was able to refit the mesh and even do modeling changes to have the edges align more closely, improving the blendshape work down the road.
We also use proxy models for reflection passes and to get proper bounce light on characters. More simple geometry allows faster renders, and we can keep the textures and use more or less similar UVs to reuse them. Also not possible with Ptex without some extra reprojection work.