 1. Export to 3ds from Cinema 4D or whatever you used to make your model and open this in Ultimate Unwrap 3D and as you can see the UV's (or UVW's if you want but I cant be bothered to type all that :)) are all messed up, 2. the preview window shoes the 3D view of the model, 3. Click GROUPS to expand all your groups and 4. here is where the materials live.....  First thing to do is RIGHT CLICK in the GROUPS area to bring up the menu and select AUTOHIDE, this means whenever you select a GROUP all the others autohidden to save confusion, AUTOSELECT......erm autoselects :)  1. If there isn't a material RIGHTCLICK MATERIAL and choose ADD from the menu, if there is DOUBLECLICK it to see the materials dialog pop up, 2. in the Diffuse map pulldown select Checker as shown, 3. click Properties 4. set the tiling to 8x8 or 16x16 or whatever you want and choose some colours as well, 5. Click OK  Ok now we wanna ASSIGN this checker to all the GROUPS, 1. Click EDIT, 2 select UNHIDE ALL, 3. click SELECT>ALL, 4. Right click your material and 5. select ASSIGN from the menu....Woohoo the gun has an uncool checkered texture :) uncool but helpful to show us where textures are stretching etc..  1. OK for the barrel we want cylindrical mapping, SELECT the barrel GROUP and Click the icon as shown and 2. play around with the x,y,z axis's until the barrel has a decent non-stretched check on it, then 3. APPLY  1. The end of the barrel needs one sided planar mapping, SELECT it and click the icon shown, 2. Again try different axis's until it has a flat check on it, 3. APPLY  1. For the Fin I used ONE SIDED PLANAR again, and 2. FRONT got me the side view :) 3. APPLY and as you can see the fins sides are mapped side on....but top will be stretched, see next step...  IN the 3d view (click to make it the focus) press "s" to toggle SELECT mode on and off, I toggled it on and selected the top edge of the fin using the usual SHIFT and click to add to the selection and CTRL and click to minus from the selection, this works in the UV space as well, this is a good way of splittin areas that are not already grouped, you could do the whole model like this but its easier/safer to keep it all in seperate named groups.  1. back to the UV layout area and ONE SIDED PLANAR map the selected top edge from above and then move it down below the side view, I have set hotkey "s" in the UV layout area to be NON UNIFORM SCALE, so I can just press "S" to scale stuff quickly...in the 3d view "s" toggles select mode on and off as mentioned above. As you can see we have a fin and the top edge neatly together this will help when you come to paint the skin.  Select the GROUP called "back" and as you can see it several parts that all face the back of the gun, APPLY ONE-SIDED-PLANAR mapping, but on the left you can see this would waste a lot of space, some of its symetrical so we do a bit of tidying up see next step.....  I select the outer bits on one side and FLIPPPED em horizontally and moved them over the top of the symetrical ones on the other side (saving UV space :)) I then moved them all in nice and tight to make a compact little area again saving UV space...  OK as you go along tidy up each group scale it down a bit and drop it outside the UV space as shown above, I also group similar GROUPS together roughly, like the parts of barrel etc in the same area, This helps keep the main UV space clear and also starts to organise all your GROUPS ready for the laying out part later. Above I click UNHIDE ALL to show all the groups, Check out the next step.  At this point I turn off AUTOHIDE in the GROUPS RIGHHTCLICK menu and as you can see its already a lot more organised after half an hours messing around....  Heres the finaished layout with very little wasted UV space. The thing to think about when UV mapping is what GROUPS/parts need more space than others i.e. more detail because stuff like the trigger is barely going to be seen so there no point having it taking up half the UV space :) in the this I made the barrel the largest cus I wanted plenty of detail/scratches etc on it later and the main part is quite big.  Goto FILE>EXPORT>UVMAP (not UV's) and I generally use 1. the Default colour this gives each group a colour to help keep em seperate, 2. Set your texture size here 512x512, 256x256 etc i am using 512x512 for this although will probably be scaled down to 256x256 later for the game engine. 3. Click Preview and as you can see heres the UV map all layed out in colour, 4. if all is OK save the thing as "gunuvmap.jpg" or something as its just the template that you use to paint the skin over. ALSO you should SAVE your model at this point and every 5 mins up until this point!!! Theres nothing worse than spending an hour mapping stuff for it to crash and you have to start again :( fortunately Unwrap 3D is pretty stable  I ASSIGNED the uvmap template texture back onto the model just to see if it all looked OK, not pretty but it soon will be :) CLICK TO GO TO NEXT STAGE IN THE TUTORIAL Copyright 2003 PSIONIC 3D GAME RESOURCES PSIONIC 3D DESIGN |
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