>>>Intermediate and Advanced UV mapping<<<

As with the modeling thread, I would like to encourage others to contribute their own techniques here. There is certainly no single way to do it, and so hopefully we will cover a few. Before I get into depth I’d like to have some brief Q&A so I can get an idea what most needs to be covered. Here’s a pic I made of a fairly simple head unwrap. I am planning on going into detail, but first let’s just make sure everybody understands what is basically going on in this pic. Steps in making this:

  1. setting the UV coords
  2. exporting the UV coords
  3. painting the texture using the exported coords as a guide
  4. applying the painted image as a texture channel
    …So, please ask questions so I will know what to explain! :smiley:
    http://home.att.net/~moton-toybox/faceselect.jpg
    The UV coords for the frog exported using jms’s UVpaint script:
    edit:image was down so i removed it. will put it back up later.

here i am, always wanted to learn to use uv map.
but i can’ undersand how it work

i have my model, i go in face select mode (f) i press (u) and i always chose from window, so i can ue a plain map in the picture window to do the same think i do with orco maps,

cant’ understand how to dispose the faces of my mesh on a template in a good way and without having a face over the other.

can you explain this?
tnx

sure, I’ll start by describing some different unwrap methods. btw, the princess was unwrapped using the ‘from window’ method in combination with RVKs. I may save that method for last, so i think i’ll start with the basic ‘from window’ concept, and reassembling UV islands. I shall return shortly with illustrations.

Right on time! THANK YOU SO MUCH…

I’ve just finished a model i need to texture using UV mapping. I’ve experimaeted before but the only way i could see to do UV mapping was simply selecting each face in turn and scaling, moving and rotating it individually in the UV map editor. :-? If this is the ONLY way ot UV map I am going to need a bigger stress ball.

Please can you cover any automatic or better ways of UV mapping.

Thank you in advance, Kanfien

EDIT

Sorry, i was writing the above message when posted your 3:43 reply. that sounds great.

Cool I’m glad this was timely for you! :smiley: Ok, I will add textual notes momentarily, but here’s the diagram,…just a note though before I return, this object could have been unwrapped alot more easily than the way i did it. i am just using this object because it works well for the purposes of this lesson. anyway here’s the diagram, I’ll be back to add note in ‘arf a mo’.
<edit> my web server seems to be on the fritz! sorry! it will iron itself out probably within the next 24 hours. :expressionless:
http://home.att.net/~moton-toybox/clownunwrap.jpg

and the text [!]
Ok, let’s see here,…

  1. Load from window. this is accomplished by going into face select mode and pressing the U key which gives you a number of options. for this lesson we are only going to use the ‘from window’ option. so, Fkey>>Ukey>>from window. Provided your faces are selected ( a key to select/deselect <edit> also, right click and shift right click <end edit>) what you will now see in the UV window will match what you see in the 3D window. My poor clown is going to look screwed up with these coords because his face is overlapping the back of his head, and his nose is overlapping parts of his face.
  2. My solution is to map the face ‘from window’, but from 4 different angles in 4 different pieces, then weld them together. I start by selecting the upper quarter of his face by right clicking on the faces, then I adjust the view so i am geeting a good spread, and click ‘U’>>‘from window’. I then move the piece out of the light gray square and move it up top just to keep things tidy.
  3. I now do the same thing to the next region, and the next etc., until i have all my faces loaded from the desired angles.
  4. Now I position the chunks so i can weld them together.
  5. This is what my coords will look like when I’m done.
  6. To weld, select the nodes you want to join with 'B’key for box select, and once selected, hit the ‘V’ key to snap them together in the middle. Start stiching. as you can see here, i have started in the center, and am moving toward the edges.
  7. Hm, things are getting a bit whacky and stretchy, so,…
  8. I scale down the good middle portion,…
  9. and move the others in around it.
  10. This was supposed to be step 5, but i numbered them wrong, so refer to 5 and continue welding until it’s all joined. also, don’t foprget to move the back of the head back into the light gray region of the UV window, otherwise it won’t recieve any texture and it won’t get exported when you export. so move the whole thing into the gray square, and arrange them, making a mental note of which chunk represents which region of the face, or,…
    export the coords using jms’s UVPaint script. Also it’s a good way to check out your coords as you go along, as it makes it quite easy to tell if anything needs to be adjusted before you actually paint your texture. The image on the right is the text console in which I am running the script.

Ok that’s all for the moment, feel free to ask questions!

Here’s the diagram for the export portion of this tut, which i will add detail to in a few moments,…
<edit> ok, we’ll start from figure 10 of the last diagram,…expoting the UV’s,…

  1. We will use 2 UV exports. First we will do an ordinary UV export ( thanks Theeth for the feature ). The way we accomplish this is to go into face select mode, make sure all your faces that you want to export are selected, go back into object mode, then go to file>>export>>UV face layout, in the file menu. This will export a tga of your UV coordinates. It is precise. Now if you have a python install, open jms’s UVpaint script ( thanks jms ) in the text window, and with your object selected press ‘alt P’ to activate the script. As you can see I have vertex painted my object already. Scale up the window until the dimensions are in excess of 500 pixels, and export the TGA. choose ‘line’ if you want a wire. Don’t choose line if you just want the vertex colors. Once you have exported the tga’s, open them in gimp or photoshop.
  2. The export you made with jms’s script is slightly less than square, so in order for it to match our UV coords exactly, we drag it on top of the regular export we made, adjust the opacity, and size it to match.
    Then we add another layer, lower the opacity, and using the first two layers as a guide, paint our texture. when we’re done, adjust the opacity of the third layer to full, and save it as a PSD, so we can come back and paint more if we have to. Blender will only read the layer that’s showing, so leave the other two intact. Actually in the illustration, I merged the two lower ones to save file space. Anyway, on to step 3,…
  3. In the third figure i have loaded the texture into the UV editor, then when i press F in the 3D window, I call up that texture in the UV editor, so i can see it behind my UV coords, and make sure everything lined up properly. Once you select everything in the UV window with A, you will see the image applied to the object if you are in potato mode ( textured draw mode ). As you can see in figure 2, I have yet to do that. If it didn’t line up, move the UV nodes so that they are all more or less where you intended them to be. Now go to materials, and add a texture to your object. choose ‘image’, and call up the PSD texture we made. Now in the materials window, for mapping, press ‘UV’. You can see this in the illustration of the princess on top of the page.
    —ok I think that will do it for now. Feel free to ask if you are unclear on any aspect of the process.
    http://home.att.net/~moton-toybox/clownUV2.jpg

Very Interesting… But What about faces that need a very good quality detail of texture? Like if I am modeling an alien head and his “nose” is not just one red ball like on that clown. If I will do his face “load from window”, the texture will end up stretched out and ugly.

What would be a possible solution to that?

Just resize your export in photoshop until the pixelage supports the detail you require.

How would that change anything? Like, on your clown’s nose there is only red texture. It’s all same texture for whole nose without any other details, so even if gets stretched out that is not visible. But, let’s say you would try to add some detail, like some shadows, to that nose. Wouldn’t those shadows get stretched out or be kind of too small because the faces taken from the window are very small (the side faces on the nose were taken from front view, so they are not their actual size).

No, the sides of the nose were taken from 4 different views, and if i zoomed in and painted nostrils on my nose texture, you would see them quite clearly i swear it.
<edit> to get an idea of what the pixelage in that area is actually like, look at the gradient around the edge of the nose texture. it’s quite smooth.
<edit> also if i wanted i could use proportional editing and the s key to scale up the nose region, but i might risk stretching the sides a bit if i scaled it up too much.

select the faces you want to have a UV image on (for ex. top part of a nose) then when you press u-> from window… the faces will be drawn in UV/ image editor. In the Image editor… you can move the vertices that were drawn depending on how much of a “stretch” you want on that whole face…

When i first heard of UV mapping and stuff… I didnt understand anything, so the best thing to do in this case is experiment first
oh and remmember… alt+z lets you view the image on the object in 3d view

Guys i just noticed something, i think it’s a new thing, but i may be mistaken,…what i noticed is that you can ( now? ) do texture paint directly onto the object, just as if it were vertex paint, but a higher resolution. was anyone aware of this?
<edit> yep it’s new alright. well this changes everything.

Texture paint has been a Blender feature since somewhere around 2.14 :).

Great to see a more advanced tutorial on uv mapping.

yes I know, but you couldn’t paint directly onto your object before. now you can paint directly onto the surface of your object, as you would with vertex paint, but at the same resolution as your image that you have your faces loaded onto in the UV editor. btw, for anyone trying it for the first time, you must have an image loaded in the UV editor, and you must have set your UV coords. once you paint the object, you can save the texture as a new file.
<edit> I generally use a solid gray image that is at least 750x750 pixels.

Painting directly on the object has been possible for a long time, and there have been no changes in the texture paint code for 2.33. It used to be broken in 2.31a I think.

Textures sizes should always be a power of 2, for example 512x512, or 1024x1024. It works faster for OpenGL, and Blender will internally scale them up anyway.

dang i wish i would have known that. ah well i know it now. :stuck_out_tongue:

Well MOdron, I have to say this is very detailed and interesting stuff. I have nothing to add to what you have alreay come up with.

Great resource here for everyone who wants to learn to UV map. And it IS the best way to make texture people. There is really no other way.

BgDM

Thanks man. I think today I am going to do ‘fixing a sphere unwrap’.
Then possibly unwrapping with material indices and then RVKS.

Well damn, that texture paint thing is a gift from the blender gods! Why hasnt anyone mentioned this? And why did JMS write that vertex paint script if we already have this feature…unless ive missed something. :wink:

dANTE