Essential Guide to UV Mapping Techniques

Now that you've completed your 3D model, we need to move on to what most people dread, which is UV mapping. So today we're going to cover workflows for mastering UV mapping. I'll be using my Datsun 240Z based on Sun Kang's mod. The UV tools and workflows I used to unwrap this model allowed me to easily accomplish this in less than an hour. This video will focus on the tools and techniques I used to do that in such a short amount of time. We'll cover key steps to UV map the majority of your models. Look at the 3D Cut and Sew tool, learn how to use free scripts to transfer UV attributes to multiple objects, discuss UV packing, textile density, and how to solve distortion, and much much more. I promise you after watching this video there won't be a single model that you can't UV map. For this tutorial I will use Maya 2020.4 but the workflows can be applied to any 3D software. So with that let's get into mastering UV mapping. Alright so here we are in Maya And I'm going to switch render layers to the base layer. And I will hide this finalized version that's fully unwrapped and bring in our demo version, we will immediately start with the five key steps and step number one being clean your model. So the first thing that we want to do is select all of your meshes here, delete history, freeze transformations, and then We're going to jump to the workspace here and I'm going to switch to UV editing. And once I do that you can see that I still have my outliner here so if it's not showing I can show it with this icon here and then I still have my 3D space view and I'll just give myself a little bit more real estate to look at the model. I have all my UV toolkit here so this is going to be a nice view to be able to show you all the tools and techniques that I used to unwrap this. Now that we have this, I want to then go to UV and then delete. So UV editor, edit, delete. So those key steps are delete history, freeze transformations, and delete UVs. This just gives you a completely clean slate to begin the UV process. And if you don't do this, it's going to cause issues down the road. You also want to keep in mind... as you freeze transformations that this is happening before you're doing anything that needs those transformations. So, you know, things like rigging and locators and whatnot. But if you're using rigs and locators, then it's a matter of just parenting those meshes. So moving on, the next thing that we want to do, and I will start with the body of the vehicle. So I will just select this body group that I have here. I will hit control one to isolate. And then now we have just the body of the vehicle. I will select this vehicle and you can see we don't have any UVs here. So the next step is we have to generate initial UVs. So go to create and do camera based. These UVs typically don't matter. We just need them to start the unwrapping process. If you go here to the right under the UV toolkit, you can see that we have create spherical, cylindrical, camera based and planar and all that. All of these are pretty much fine. If you use cylindrical, planar, spherical, it really doesn't matter. Just do not use automatic. Because what automatic will do is just take all of these and split it into a bunch of different UV objects based off of the six planes here. And we don't want that because we don't want to have to stitch and sew seams. So again, you're just going to select your mesh and do camera based. Now that we have camera based, I will start with something like this that's a bit more organic and a little bit more complex. And we need to create our seams. So with this object selected, if we want this to unfold properly, we have to create seams. Now in order to do that, we have to separate this so it unfolds properly, I will hold right click, go into edge mode, and double click some edges here. Now you can certainly work with the symmetry modifier if you'd like. But I'm just going to select these edges like so I guess selected the wrong one, it was actually down here. Alright, so I'm going to cut this piece off. And then I'm going to go to the bottom of the door sill and cut this as well. Okay. Now I'm doing this. So the front end here unfolds separately, and the back end will unfold separately. And then I want this set of edges here. Now, these edges selected, you can go to your UV editor, hold Shift, right click and then do cut. And then now that we've cut, you can see that it becomes bold and white and that now becomes a seam. So, for example, if I go to UV, double click our UVs here, you can see that now this is a separate UV shell. The front end has also separated. And so we've created this nice separation between all these different panels here. And now that we've done that, We can move on to the next step, which is unwrap and unfold our UVs. So by simply selecting our mesh, going to the right here, and then selecting Unfold. So scroll down until you get to Unfold, and then you have Unfold, and let it do its magic. And there you go. At this point in time, I would go through and better organize our UVs and just rotate them. You'll see that I'm not actually worrying about packing anything because that will happen in just a moment, but I want these to at least rotate nicely. Alright, and so once these have, I have these rotated in position, I can simply select this and go to layout. And then there it goes. It goes ahead and packs everything into this one to one UV space. Now the nice thing is I can do that with the rest of my objects. Now, For these objects, you can see because these are separate pieces that I don't need seams. I can easily select this door panel, hit unfold, and it'll do its thing. And I just rotate this into position and I can do that with the rest of the objects. So depending on your model, you may have an easier time if things are separated into different objects and it'll be a lot easier for you, you know. once you're once you're doing the UVs. So I can now actually select everything, and then do again, and unfold and it'll go through and unfold everything. Now there may be some areas that need some extra work. So I'll then lay out so kind of neatly lays everything out and I can see everything. And then I can select this roof and start rotating objects. So they're nice and plainer. You may be asking, Well, why does that matter? The reason why is because depending on your texture resolution, texture sizes, you may have to battle aliasing. So if your textures are at an angle, you'll get what's called, you know, aliasing and jaggies going up, you know, depending on how many pixels you have. So it's just a really nice thing to keep in mind as you're doing UVs and just keep them nice and straight and nice and planar. So they can be, you know, 90 degrees or... in any direction, but this should be good enough. And then you can see we have our headlight details, which should have unfolded okay. And then I can simply select all of this again and lay these out. So to recap these steps and these workflows, it's simply cleaning the model. So deleting history, freezing transforms, and deleting UVs. Generate your initial UVs by using camera base. creating your seams with edge selection and then cut, and then unwrapping with unfold, and then packing and laying out. So now I can apply this workflow to essentially any other object within this model. For example, for this mod kit that I have here, I can select all of the mesh. So make sure you don't select it by the group. You actually select it, marquee select the meshes in the viewport. And then I want to generate UVs because I've already gone through deleted history freeze transforms and deleted UVs. So I have to generate UVs. Camera based. You can see it gets a little bit crazy there. No big deal. So we have all of these different mod kits and mod pieces here. And because these are pretty much separate, these will unfold nicely. So I can now select these and then unfold. This unfold tool works really really well and gives you really nice results And of course, you know you go through and just kind of clean up the UVs here and this workflow applies to whether you're using things like 3ds max or softwares like 3ds max or even blender in 3ds max You know, it has a pelting and quick pelting and blender You're still gonna select seams and apply seams or mark seams as they call it in there And then you just use unwrap instead of unfold. All right, now here's something a little bit more complex. This is not going to unfold properly. So we're going to apply that workflow again. So we've already cleaned the mesh, we've already generated UVs. Now let's go through and select our UVs. So I will select UVs, like so. And I'm going to separate the this into three pieces, this front piece, this middle piece and this back piece here. And you can see I have these nice edges kind of running around. the length of the mesh. So topology and edge flow makes this even easier. And then what I can do actually mean maximize this here, or this should be fine, this is maximized. And then I can select this edge running across and this edge here. Alright, so now that we have that this will separate into multiple pieces. So I've now selected my seams and I want to cut my seams. So you can use cut here on the UV toolkit. or hold shift right click and do cut. I like that because it's a little bit faster. Then you can select all of your UVs. So switch to UV mode, select all of your UVs by marquee select, and then unfold. And then watch that. And it goes through and unfolds properly. And so you have these nice clean UVs. And everything looks really good. And so we're going to go through and move these around. And we have that. So you can see, I will double check some things here and unfold or now that I have these unfolded, run a layout. And you can see that these will properly position and scale. Now, of course, I want to check my checkerboard. So we're just focusing on the workflows. But now that we have the workflow down, let's take a look at this with this checker view here, this checker map here. So hit this icon and you can see we have the checkerboard and the goal here is to have nice even squares. So for example, if I select this and for whatever reason, scale this, if I had transformed, you'd notice this, if it was scaled, you'd have long rectangles. That's bad. Even though this unfolded properly, it scaled really far in one axis here. Now I don't want that. So that's why you want to make sure just to hit that unfold, and then get those nice even squares, all right, and to prevent any any distortion. All right. So this is looking good. And we're applying this workflow, this five step workflow. But you can do something that's even easier. All right. And something that's even easier. So I will grab the side view mirror here. And I will hit Ctrl one to isolate. and we don't have any UVs. So if I create camera based UVs, we have this, okay. And you can see it's one sided, so it does not have thickness on the inside because of the mirror that's blocking it, I can now take this and use the 3d cut and so tool. So if you thought the previous workflow was even easier, well, the 3d cut and so tool is even easier, I'm going to actually turn off checker view. And we're going to use that tool. So if you go to UV at the top, and go to 3d cut and so you'll see immediately it says drag to cut control drag to so meaning i can go in here if you drag with the left click like this you can just start selecting edges which is really nice or if i select edges like this by going down these edges here i can hold ctrl to remove those edges as well so that's the workflow that it's telling you Obviously, we want to make sure to focus on nice edge flow and edge loop. And you can easily do that with double clicking. So if I double click this, look at that. It immediately has selected this edge and then cut this. So it combined our create seam step in essentially a couple of clicks. And then I can select the other portion here, this front portion. So by double clicking that and let's say, oh, no, like I don't want these edges here. I don't want to split this. You can simply hold control and left click and it'll remove your seams. And there you go. And then here I can finish this off by creating this nice kind of cap. So left clicking here, there, and then I can remove these and kind of clean these up. And you can see it updating in the UV editor. So if we zoom out, take a look, you can see that we have this concave object essentially, that we need to split underneath. So unfolds. And once we do that, you know, you can hit Q to exit the tool, go back to object mode. and then unfold and there you go it unfolds really nicely and then we can take a look at the checkerboards even though these are at kind of at an angle that is perfectly fine so it's kind of giving you kind of this uh more of this radial effect but that's fine as long as your uvs are nice and even squares right so these are nice and clean and even squares so let's go and jump to a much more complex object like the tire So the tire here is a higher poly object and it is made for using that UV tool, the 3D UV tool. So you can use either workflow. So now that we have a clean mesh, I will create and generate camera based UVs, turn off my checkerboard so I can see. And what I want to do is essentially separate the sidewall here from the top. So the sidewall, I apologize, is this, the front. And then this is the tread. So I want to separate the sidewall from the tread. And I can easily do that with edge flow. And if I go to UV, actually, I have it here, right there. So the 3d cut and sew tool, if you want to add that to your shelf, you can go to UV, hold Ctrl Shift, and then left click 3d cut tool. And then there you go, you can see that it's added. So I can right click and delete that since I already have it. Now that we have that I can now double click the edges that I want. So I know because I have good clean topology and edge flow, I can separate our sidewall here. So if I double click this edge that runs all the way around, boom, it has created that as a nice separate UV shell. And then I can double click here. There you go. And now we need to make sure that we have a seam running along the bottom, right? So the key thing to keep in mind when it comes to mastering UVs is if you ever have the cylindrical objects here, you need to have a seam somewhere running essentially perpendicular to the mesh. So because I have this, I want one running essentially perpendicular here. So I can select these edges. Now you have to be careful. Because if I zoom in, you can see that it doesn't quite finish here. And Actually, if I want to include this bead here, I can. So I'll just double click with left click, add this edge here with left click, hold control left click. So you can see how easy it is to add and remove seams. So I've added that seam. And then I'm going to go through and do that on the front. So I have this tire bead here. And I'm first going to add the right seam. So I double click these edges there, control click to remove the seam, double click. And then I can control click double or just maybe control click like so. All right. So we get that. Make sure I didn't miss anything. We're going to get real close here. So that's looking good. With our seams in place, we just want to select the tire. Hold right click, go into UV mode or leave it in object mode and just simply unfold. So you can do that if you're kind of working in UVs. You can like separately select. UVs and unfold them or you can simply select the entire mesh and it'll re unfold the entire mesh. And there you go. So this worked out really well, and is really nice. And you can imagine this 3d cut. And so tool is going to speed up workflow significantly, right and then now I can hit layout. And there you go. Looking good. So we can continue that workflow on something like this tire. or excuse me this wheel rim where I will apply camera based so we have camera based uvs and with camera based uvs I can now start selecting my seams so again you could if I wanted to use the other workflow like if you're just kind of experimenting you can double click this edge here and this edge here on the inside of the wheel drum and we can kind of run and select maybe this edge, maybe this edge here. Alright, so we've selected all those. So same thing applies to this workflow, right? I need to make sure my UVs connect, excuse me, my seams connect. And this is looking good. So I have the one running all the way around to separate the inside of the drum. I have the seam running along the bottom. perpendicular to this flow. And then now I can go into here and cut and then go to UV mode. And I can separate these and I can separately unfold this piece here. So again, you can use either workflow. So you can see I can actually use a combination here. And now I will use the same thing I will use UV. And then I'll use the 3d cut tool. And then we can start separating. the rest of the mesh here. So I will select probably here on the outside of that drum, the inside of this drum here. And because I have good edge flow, I can continue to select. Now, don't worry, I'm going to cover a technique that I'll select using different methods and not edges, right? If you have a more complex or let's say a triangulated mesh and whatnot. But this is working well, I can continue to work my way around. And it's really nice because I can just kind of, you know, select and immediately create those seams. And they're fully visualized by giving me this white, bold look here. And I can do the inside piece. And remember, you have to separate things. It's just good practice to separate things that have thickness from inside and outside. So I can, you know, select this piece here. And, you know, you can also think about it, you know, if I left-click. this edge, this edge, this edge that runs up to the front there. So I like that. You know, you can think about it like, you know, a lot of times like a complex orange, right? You're just kind of creating more and more seams, the more complex your objects are. So this should help visualize and what I always recommend to if you're, you know, it comes with practice, but if you're like, how do I know which seams to select, I'm just separating the front from the back of this wheel rim. So you can see the front set of faces here from the back set of faces and just using this edge flow here, I'm separating this drum fate set of faces from this outside, and then I have this right. And that just allows things to unfold properly. Right? Now, with that, I might have to add more seams. I'm not sure. So I'll go to object mode, you'll kind of see me kind of do this live, hit unfold. and let it do its thing and it unfolded and then hit layout let's see how things look and things are looking pretty good right and it unfolded and you can see that all right well if i go into checker mode you can see it kind of gives me this kind of radial look and now look at these stretching of these uvs this is what i mean right because this cylindrical object does not have a seam right i need to add uh one that runs perpendicular to this edge flow, meaning I have, so if I turn off the edge flow, this is what I mean by perpendicular, right? These are my edge rings running this way, right? And my edge loops, and I want a perpendicular edge to cut that. So it's kind of this 90 degree here. So I'll go ahead now and select this edge and run that all the way up. to here and I'm not in 3d cut tool, no problem, just select your edges and cut. And there you go. You can also select your edges right within the UV editor. Meaning if it's like things are pretty complex and pretty messy, I can just select this edge, jump to my editor view or UV editor, double click this edge and look at that it stops it right where the seams are. So that's also a nice thing that you can do. So select this edge, hit cut, double click this UV editor. and hit unfold and it'll unfold nicely. Now you'll notice there's a slight bend and whatnot in these and for the most part that is completely fine. The only time you need perfectly straight UVs is when you have a noticeable tile or noticeable pattern like a fabric pattern or you know wood pattern and whatnot. Take a look at one of my other tutorials where I actually cover that in further detail where I show how to make perfectly straight UVs. And here oh crap you know i missed this edge here no problem right we're doing this live and trying to figure out you know all these workflows as we go so i missed this edge and then i can select it hold shift right click cut that and there you go right because this is what's going to happen most of the time most of the time things aren't going to unfold perfectly perfectly so you're going to have to find these edges and kind of recut them and resell them so Now that we have this right, I want to take a look at distortion, right? So things may look good here, I would say, you know, I have this checker view and things are starting to look okay. But if you go to view mode, and go to UV distortion here, we can see what starts to happen, right, we can see that we're getting a little bit of blue, we're getting a little bit of red, and a little bit of blue and little bit of red is okay, for the most part, a little bit of tense here and there. Right. And the way that, you know, right, is when you scale up, it means it's being stretched. Right. And if it's being scaled in, it's being squashed. Right. So with with that, knowing that the way to alleviate distortion, there's no trick. It's just more seams. Right. I'm not going to go in here and start massaging UVs and starting to use relax in specific areas. That is an absolute waste of time. Honestly, right so I can turn off my checkerboard turn off my UV distortion Actually, you can just hit 7 on your keyboard and then now we can just start to add more seams so what I want to do now is go to UV 3d cut and so tool and I can run this edge and kind of separate this part of the wheel from the front wheel Right, and if I wanted to I can say you know what now that I have this You know, I can select this edge that's running all the way down. Oops, it looks like I kind of missed that here. But for the sake of this demo, I'll just kind of run that here to right about here. So I double click that edge that runs all the way. And I can now select this, move it off. And if we turn on hit seven again to look at distortion, unfold this. There you go. You see how now that let me undo and redo that, right, we have this quite a bit of red here. And then I unfold, and we have less distortion, right. And if I select this, I can re unfold this with this. And it helps alleviate some of that. If you wanted to, like, you know, I've looked at some materials and whatnot on here, this is fine. I don't need to push this any further. But if you absolutely want to write in with seven on the keyboard, I can, you know, start to select these edges here, right? So we're kind of mixing workflows and whatnot. So I can select these inside edges here. And there we go. I think I got the right ones. And I can cut these off. So now we have this separate. Oops, looks like I missed something here. No big deal. I can, you know, select these. edges. So you know, you could if you want to run these across, if you so want to, and just further add more UVs and seams. Alright, so cut that. And then now I should be able to easily separate these and unfold. And we get something like that, right. And if I hit seven on my keyboard, you know, you can start to see I'm getting less and less red here. So the goal here when it comes to UVs is to just continue to add seams right here you can see it's really dark blue really dark red no problem I'm going to select these edges that run along the inside and separate these bolt holes here like so and go into here and cut these perfect hit seven look at our distortion you Unfold as we go. And we've separated that. That's helped alleviate that redness. And blue. And unfold these. And, you know, if you want, you can do the cap. But because this cap on the inside is going to be hidden by bolts here, I'm fine. I can leave these as is. All right? So that, you know, is pretty much the workflow here for unwrapping objects. Okay? Now, one thing you can do. is, you know, I have this brake caliper that has a lot of detail and whatnot. And I don't want you guys to be like afraid of using some quick and easy and dirty methods. Because what matters is what is the material type going to be right? Also context, if this is going to be used in, you know, a game engine or a different type of engine that needs cleaner UVs, then definitely go in and start separating these inner portions and separating. them from the rest of the object, but For this, I can select this and this would be a fine time to use automatic, right? Because this is a very planar object and I can get a pretty good looking set of UVs right off the bat, right? And I don't need to really do anything else. If I wanted to be very particular about the seams, then I would go through and manually unwrap it. But you know, if you're like here, let me move closer, right? And I can select these edges, right? I just kind of want to show you the other method of using auto unwrap and then stitching them. So I can select these and then I can do stitch together. And boom, look at that, right? So, you know, but again, be careful. I wouldn't spend so much time using auto unwrap and stitching UVs. Honestly, I would just select my seams, unfold and move on, right? But. because I know this is going to have like this noisy caliper material, this bumpy caliper material painted look, auto UVs are fine, right with procedural materials. Okay, so just keep that in mind that sometimes auto map automatic UVs are perfectly fine. Okay. So the next thing that I want to cover is, you know, applying this workflow to something that has a lot of repeatable objects, right. So for example, we have this simple grill piece here. All right. And you can see these are exactly the same mesh. I took this mesh, copied, duplicated, and moved it. Right. But the thing is I didn't unwrap it before I moved on. Well, this is where we can use something called transfer attributes. So since I have these UVs here and they have camera based UVs on them already, I can go through now and let's use our 3d cut tool or UV tool. And I can, you know, double click and start selecting these here and I can run these edges across and of course I mean I don't have symmetry on but you can use the modeling toolkit here and enable symmetry if you'd like on world x or whatever is your symmetry access right so I'll undo that and If I go back here, I'm going to show you what I mean. So if I hit World C, now move this off, or actually I can like put it in here with the UV toolkit, and I have to redo that scene. So if I jump back to modeling toolkit, symmetry, world X, so X is my line of symmetry. I'm going to run this all the way across and then double click this, right and this will save me a few clicks when adding seams on symmetrical objects. And there you go. I don't have to do it on both sides. So definitely work with symmetry if you can. And I will select these now and jump back to my editor or UV toolkit. And hold Shift right click unfold, unfold, unfold. And there you go. Right, so we get these nice UVs. Here you can see this little box here and you know I can select these. It gets a little bit annoying when you're trying to manipulate UVs. So no big deal. You know you can always turn that off once you've got your seams in place and whatnot. So I can put these back and hit layout and it'll pack these all. You know just to be nice and neat I'll rotate these in position. That looks good and Now, of course, I can manually do that for each one of these objects. But to save time, I'm going to select these, this object here, okay, and I'm going to delete history. And I want to open up mesh transfer attributes. Now, make sure to grab the dialog settings. So open up the dialog. And then here are the settings. All right. Now, these are the settings that you want to use. But if you haven't used these before. I will just reset settings and I'll show you which ones that I always use. So what I want to transfer over since these objects are the same is I want to use UV sets, hit all, good. I don't need color sets so that can be off. And then I want to sample space, I want to use component here. All right, this is off for mirroring or mirroring, flip UVs is off and that should be all I need. So just make sure really you have UV sets set to all. and then component enabled. So with that, if I zoom out, you can see that these, you know, already have existing camera based UVs, but I can select this object first, and I want to transfer it to this object. So hit apply. Boom, there you go. Look at that. And then now you can select this main object here, the parent object or the original object, I should say, select the next one and hit apply. Boom. Then you can select all of these, delete history. And relay these out. There you go. Like magic. So that's not so bad when you have, you know, one or two or I should say two or three objects you want to transfer UVs. The challenge comes when you have something like this. So I got these bolts here. And guess what? I have one, two. I have about 10 on this fender here. 10 here. 10 here. I have about 40 of these bolts. And I can go through and if we quickly unwrap this, so I'll hit control one to isolate. Got this nice little sub D bolt. So it's going to subdivide nicely if I want to go that crazy and subdivide bolts. But I will hit UV, actually just go into my 3D UV, start selecting my seams. Edge flows nice and clean. This will work for my needs. Separate this back piece. And run this edge along here. All right, there we go. Hit Q to exit the tool. Go back to object mode. Hit unfold. Bam, look at that. Easily unwrapped, okay? Now that was easily unwrapped, but I do not want to do that 40 times, okay? Nor do I want to transfer attributes 40 times, right? Because the annoying thing is, I can't tell that this is the original object and I want to transfer it to all 40, right? So let me just hit layout here. And I got that and this would be the time like if you want to be real meticulous about your UV rotation Make sure all of this is done before you hit transfer attributes. Everything's looking good. I like it minor adjustments on and so forth Cool hit layout again. We're good Now if I go to my mod kit go to this group, it's all of these cylinders here All right, so I can you know select this here Again, all of these already have like camera based UVs and whatnot. But if I select this object than the next object and hit the transfer attributes here, so I go back to mesh transfer attributes, and bring this over and hit apply. Boom, that works. But again, I don't want to do this 40 times, right? Right. No problem. What I want to refer you to, and I'll put this in the description down below is a lot of times you know, other artists are going through this and you can find scripts of people that ran into similar issues. So how to transfer UVs from one object to multiple similar objects. And here we have Nicholas Morlant, sorry if I pronounced your name wrong, and he has this script here that he got from somebody else from Nestor Prado. And that is from this Tumblr link right here. Okay, so he went and, you know, has a script that does this. And I just referenced the ArtStation because it's a nice, easier copy. So what you want to do is just grab this here. This is a key thing to keep in mind. This is a Python script. Grab this script, control, or excuse me, just right-click it. So I'm going to copy the script. I will now go to my script editor. So bottom right corner, there's this little tiny icon for your script editor. Hit that to open. And then now we want to create this script and paste it in here. We know this is a Python script. So we want to make sure we're in Python, then right click or just hit Ctrl V. And there you go. Now, the easy thing is you can simply paste the script in here, and then use this option, save script to shelf. And you can see I've already done that. So I'll do that again. So I can hit save script to shelf, I'll just call this, you know, I'll just call test because I'm going to delete it and hit OK. And there you go, boom, it puts it right into your shelf. So I'll move this over. And now watch this. So just for a quick test, I want to select this and then the other cylinder, and I will do transfer UV, boom, it works. Now, if I select this, and then like all of the other ones, so you know, you want to just control click all of these, right. And you can try to use marquee select to but sometimes it might not know the right order, but this should work and watch this transfer. Boom, done, just like that, right? So then now... You can see that I also have these. Actually, these were all of these here. So I've already done it on these 20 here. Keep in mind, actually, it's not this one. I should move this out of this mod kit. This is a keyhole because it does not match the bolt topology. In order for this to work, it has to be a one-to-one and match perfectly with the UVs and vertices. Or not UVs and vertices, but vertices. You can see the keyhole is just a little bit different. All right. So now that I have that, you know, I can select this object, go to the other one that's been essentially mirrored over, and I can start selecting all of these. Now, you know, worst case worse, if you copy it over, and use transfer attributes for an object that's not the same, then it'll just like, say, Oh, you know, didn't work. But I'll deselect that there. Alright, so you have that. I'll use the transfer the script there you go you now have all of these cylinders here all of these bolts perfectly unwrapped you know so I can select these and deselect whatever I don't want I don't want my keyhole and there we go and I need to make sure I hit delete history right because it's also you know it transferred the UVs but you in order to pack these if you use packing you'll notice that it's not going to pack properly because I need to delete history. So delete history, then hit layout, and then watch. Boom, like magic, right? So very helpful. Big thanks to the guys that put this out there and is sharing it with everybody. Obviously, the original author, you know, very helpful here. So thank you for sharing that. Nestor Prado. And then thanks for sharing that on ArtStation, Nicholas Moreland. So these scripts are super nice to you know, go through something repetitive like this and unwrap all of these same objects Alright, so we're making good progress here and the next thing that I want to show so I have these mod kits Right and the key thing that I wanted to show you is this where you can see I have my body and then I have Mod kit in a separate set of UVs. Now the mod this is important because the mod kits are the same material as the body, but sometimes they'll be on a different UV set. Or, you know, let's say, if I actually go back to my original reference here, you know, and I modeled it based off of, again, Sun Kang's model or mod. But if I wanted to create like a non-modded version, the original one here, and I want to slap mods on later or different mods, right, then those will be completely separate objects and potentially be on separate UV sets. Well, the thing is, if I select all of these objects here. Actually, I want to make sure that I only have the body here. So I have the body. And then I'm going to grab the all of the mod kit sheet metal or body paint. And, you know, I'll leave I'll leave that there with the plastic piece, but this is fine. Right. So I have these. And with the body, right, you can see that these are packed here. And if I hit this, icon here for checker map. Watch what happens when I select all of these. Get in closer and you'll notice that the checkers for the sheet metal, the main body, is different size than the fender flares right and all of the mod kits. This will cause issues right. It might be small but when you get in close guess what's going to be a repeatable pattern is paint flakes right or anything that has noise. or anything that has a repeatable pattern. The last thing you want is to have two objects that are supposed to have the same material properties have different UV coordinates. Well, this is where part of mastering UVs is understanding textile density. Okay, meaning if I now take this object, and I say, Okay, I like these bodies, you want to grab what's been packed, and the larger objects here. So this will work for what I need. and select any one of these objects that have been laid out, right? So you select these objects, lay them out, and we're good to go there. Now, a key thing you need to understand about actually the layout tool, if I go to modify layout so and hit the dialog box, I am using default settings. And if you want, you can change this if you know that you're going to have a 512, a 1024 or 2048 map. If I say, you know, I know for sure I'm going to have 2048. Meaning, you know, I'll have 2048 pixels. You can hit pixels here and give yourself a little bit of padding. And I typically give myself two pixels of shell padding. And then from there, I can, you know, now hit apply and hit layout UVs or just hit layout UVs and that'll apply those settings there. And then now this has been packed and there's this nice padding here of two pixels. Previously, if there wasn't, sometimes, you know, in older versions of Maya, these UVs will be literally right on top of each other and you don't want that, right? So by having this two pixel shell padding, that gives you exactly what you want. and everything looks good right now again like for example these will are supposed to be on a different uv set so they're not going to be packed to that but what you can do is select the main or the master model here that has everything packed and you want to go up to transform and scroll down to get and set okay so get so git tells you the textual density of this object. So if I hit get here, you can see it's 1.1. It's using a map size of 512. That's fine as long as this remains consistent. Then if I select now, what's in my modkit group here, and select all of these objects, great, I can have these be on a different UV set like this, then hit set, and then boom. Now, if I select and look at everything, I have these on two completely different UV sets and texture sets, but the textile density is the same between them. And this is very, very important when you have things that are multiple materials and that need to be the same textile density. Okay. So that's really good to know and a real good tool to have in your arsenal. Now, the next thing I want to show you is when edge flow. isn't gonna work or if you need to, if you want to use a different method. For example, I'll take this little door handle here. You can see, you know, pretty complex and, you know, the way that I have things modeled and these edges, you know, it's not a perfect selection, right? So let me turn off checker faces here. So what I'm getting at is I will generate camera based UVs here. So if you go, let me minimize transform, do camera base. And from here, I want to create UVs but not use edge selection. Well, I like to use, you know, in the modeling toolkit that I have docked here, I can use selection constraint angle. Now with angle, you want to set it to something relatively low, depending on the density of your mesh. And I can use something like 10 or 15. And I'll maybe bump this up to 15. And then watch this. I can now select by faces. And you might say, okay, well, that's great. But now how do I create this as a UV? If you go here now into your UV editor, hold shift right click to create UV show. And look at that. It selects these faces and creates this as a completely separate UV show, right? And I can drop this down to maybe something like 10 here. And I want to do face selection. There we go, because it was set to element selection. But and I can grab these faces here now, like this. And I've used this for things that, you know, if I'm using someone else's model, or I've downloaded a model for a project, and I need to unwrap the UVs, but the topology and edge flow is crap and messy, right? So here, this is a good example of how you can use, you know, edge or face selection, polygon selection to create UV shells. So with all of these selected now, I've created these as UV shells, I can go back to my UV editor toolkit or UV toolkit and hit unfold. And there you go. Just like that. Another easy way to generate UVs on objects that aren't as perfect, right? So angle select is crucial and really nice and gives you great results here. So I like that and I'll hit layout and it'll use my new settings that I have. And I can then take this. It's like, oh, I have two door handles. I don't want to go through that all over again, right? So I select this mesh. I select both of them actually. Delete history. Select this as my parent object or original object. Sorry for saying parent. Original object. And then shift click the second object that I want to copy it to. Go to mesh. Transfer attributes. These are the settings that I'm using. and hit apply then there you go boom all right so this works nicely and it's really easy and gives me what i want Now the one thing I also want you to keep in mind is if you have these objects here, like this, and well, I don't want to do that. But I'll relay these out. And let's say you don't even have these over here. And if you delete these, and you want to just straight up mirror this, I can, you know, select this mirror, and I can grab my channel box editor. So I'll go ahead and dock that in here with all my other panels, hit delete history. And I can mirror this over negative scale, you have to keep in mind that when you do that you have a negative scale on an object, it may cause issues, you know, when you take it into other softwares and other render engines, okay, I know it's just actually a little bit off, but this is fine for what I'm doing. And what you need to do to fix that is just make sure to freeze transforms. after you've mirrored it over freeze transforms then go back to UV toolkit and unfold those objects okay so now if I go to unfold and then it'll properly unfold these objects and I'll make sure my normal direction my surface normals my faces and everything are all in the right direction okay so you know that's what you need to do there So I mean, I have these actually, you know, parented, but I can delete the original one. Oops, looks like I deleted the wrong one. So let me just undo here real quick. Alright, there we go. And I can, you know, hit duplicate, freeze transformations on my symmetry axis. And then once I have negative scale, freeze transformation, select the side view mirror, and then go back to my UV toolkit and unfold and everything will be oriented properly. So just make sure that if you're mirroring stuff that that is the what you have to do. Now the other thing to keep in mind is when it comes to text and textures. So text as in like words and fonts and stuff, you don't want to use symmetry. So if I go to my wheels here, I have this set of wheels here and I'll just group these so the parent pivot is at the world origin and let's say I do a negative scale watch what happens right if I do that it kind of really messes things up and look at that the Fuguzi here is flipped and in the wrong direction right and this is going to cause issues guess what anywhere else that you have text meaning your sidewalls If you have like a nice like, you know, Michelin, Bridgestone or off road text tires here, and you flipped it with negative x but didn't re unfold it. Guess what, I've seen this in a lot of people's models where the text is reading backwards. Okay, so the easy thing to do, you know, is to if I hide that, you know, when you duplicate the object here, let me undo. then kind of go back here. So you have this object, you would, you know, Ctrl D duplicate, then you would move this, and then rotate it 180 degrees. Okay, so that's another method that you can do. Now, if you want this perfect, right, so let's say I didn't, I didn't do this previously, the method that I use is just use the reference tire like this, where I'll duplicate scale, and then I'll take this object here, the actual tire. and rotate it 180 degrees. Then I will grab this tire for reference and I'll use this align tool. So the align selection, it's also under modify align tool. It's just a nice little 3d gizmo that you can use to align your, your, your models. And there you go. And then I can delete this once I have this as a reference and there you go. And this is actually how they do it in the real world, right? We can't mirror things and flip things on. a mirrored axis. So we have to physically take this object, this wheel and rim, move it and rotate it and put it in position and bolt it on. And so everything is going to look proper when you do that. Okay, so what I'll do now is hide the demo version and bring in the final version. And let's say like, you know, you have this where you have all your materials and your texture sets, your material sets and everything ready to go. but you want to do a final pass of it right you can of course select the mesh here right and look at the checkers but if you want to use your own custom checker then i highly recommend you know you go to this uv texture by veil and you can create your own procedural own different version of textures which is super nice you know you can use presets here or you know you can just create your your own versions it's super nice so definitely take a look at this tool it's nice and you can create your own custom versions right so if you want to use custom texture maps, what you can do is, and you don't want to overwrite all your materials here, just use render layers, right? So I'm going to use the render setup here. And I'll show you how I quickly do this with the new one. So I will create a new render layer. And you know, I'll call it UV layer demo. So just use that icon to create a new layer, right click this layer now and create a collection. All right. And this will be Geo Collection 2. So this is any of your geometry lights or cameras would go in here. And then I can just select this. That's a UV final. Middle mouse drag this into this collection here. Then on this collection, right click, do Create Material Override. And you can do, I'll just do UV Demo, Material Override, and open up your Hypershade. You can see I already have one, but just in case, I will scroll down and create a nice, simple Lambert material. So left click Lambert, zoom in here, and we will go to color, hit the color dialog option and hit file. And I will simply find my UV checkerboard. So I already have this that I really like to use. So I hit open and there you go. So this is now here. right and I can call this you know, M underscore, you know, UV demo. Now that I have that you can select the place texture node here. And let's first actually apply this. Okay, so you know, losing a little bit of real estate, but it's fine. I'll move my render setup here, because now I need both of these. Because I need to middle mouse drag my new demo material on this override material. So middle mouse drag this and if you're using older version of Maya, just make sure to override drag it over the word override, otherwise it won't link properly. How do you know it linked properly, you have a black arrow for the output connections. Otherwise, it'll just this is bug in older versions where it doesn't actually connect. Okay, so once you do that, you can actually I'll just use attribute editor for this. And then we can now jump into right we have the final version here, I can hit this and now you can see Alright, cool. So we're making good progress. Now I can change the tiling of this if I hit Ctrl A. And you need to select the material. So, you know, if you're not sure, I mean, you can actually just select the mesh. And you go to UV demo here, go to color, output connections, place 2D textures. And you can change this to like whatever you want, 10 by 10, or 20 by 20, I think is what I used. for the intro there. Okay. So this is how you can double check and review with kind of your own custom grid and make sure things are looking good. But don't forget to use, you know, this checkered view here with distortion with seven on your keyboard, just to make sure you do that final pass and final clean version there. Oops, I hit seven in the viewport, which is lighting mode. So, but six. Five will take you to non textured version, six on your keyboard will take you to textured, seven lighting, no lighting, so I'll stay up with six. Just make sure one of the final things is to keep in mind as you know you're going through and creating UVs, it all starts with edge flow and topology, right? A lot of people may say well that's unfolding a lot easier than my models or models that I found online. It's because of the edge flow and topology. When you have that in mind, Now if I actually switch back to my master layer, all of my materials are here. Now what I'm getting at is if your edge flow is good, then your UVs will be so much easier. So spend the time having nice, neat, and clean UVs and edge flow, which will lead to nice, clean UVs. It all trickles down, and it all trickles down to the next part, which is going to be texturing materials. shading rigging animation and so on and so forth you guys know how i like topology so you know, make sure to check out my other videos here, where I cover a lot more UVs. So I cover how to UV map complex objects. And this is the one I was talking about UV mapping curved surfaces. So that's the one if you need really specific UVs. And then if you want to send, you know, you can share this video or just send this one here, which is just using map anything in five minutes, I don't use the 3d cut tool. or the 3D UV tool. I just stick to the previous workflow or the original workflow, but either way, that'll get people going. And then of course, I have my entire free series up on YouTube of how to start from scratch with modeling a 3D car. So I start with a cube and curves and take you all through the process. The other thing to wrap up is a lot of people were asking about the model. So I will be putting this model up for sale for you to download. So... I'll put it up for sale, and then within the first week, watch my YouTube, watch my Instagram. I'm going to be putting out a coupon code to get 50% off the model that first week. You will also receive free updates. If you buy it once, I plan to fully materialize this with Maya, V-Ray, Arnold, and I also plan to use Blender and Blender Cycles. That'll come down the road, but if you buy it now, you're going to have... all those free updates. I'll make sure to include that in on my art station. So there's always links in the description. But you know, you can take a look at my art station here. Now I have my portfolio, and then my store here, which I'm going to start adding more models for cheap, you know, I keep all my models really, really cheap for everyone to download. And then I have a gumroad if if gumroads your thing. So okay, so I hope this was helpful. I didn't unwrap everything. from beginning to end. But I'm telling you, this is the workflow that I use to unwrap this entire model, like I said, in less than an hour. So I really hope you found this helpful. If you guys got any other tips, throw them down in the comments. Honestly, like when I put my original UV mapping tutorial, somebody says, hey, you should use the 3D cut tool, the 3D, what is it? The 3D cut and sew tool. And I said, oh yeah, I'll take a look. And I took a look at that. I was like, oh man, this is really good. So. Definitely save some time. I always appreciate your guys'insights. You know, I've been doing this for a while, but, you know, there's so many things changing. So throw them down below. Always appreciate feedback. So take care and I will see you all around.

The UV tools and workflows I used to unwrap this model allowed me to easily accomplish this in less than an hour. This video will focus on the tools and techniques I used to do that in such a short amount of time. We'll cover key steps to UV map the majority of your models. Look at the 3D Cut and Sew tool, learn how to use free scripts to transfer UV attributes to multiple objects, discuss UV packing, textile density, and how to solve distortion, and much much more. I promise you after watching this video there won't be a single model that you can't UV map.

For this tutorial I will use Maya 2020.4 but the workflows can be applied to any 3D software. So with that let's get into mastering UV mapping. Alright so here we are in Maya And I'm going to switch render layers to the base layer.

And I will hide this finalized version that's fully unwrapped and bring in our demo version, we will immediately start with the five key steps and step number one being clean your model. So the first thing that we want to do is select all of your meshes here, delete history, freeze transformations, and then We're going to jump to the workspace here and I'm going to switch to UV editing. And once I do that you can see that I still have my outliner here so if it's not showing I can show it with this icon here and then I still have my 3D space view and I'll just give myself a little bit more real estate to look at the model. I have all my UV toolkit here so this is going to be a nice view to be able to show you all the tools and techniques that I used to unwrap this.

Now that we have this, I want to then go to UV and then delete. So UV editor, edit, delete. So those key steps are delete history, freeze transformations, and delete UVs. This just gives you a completely clean slate to begin the UV process. And if you don't do this, it's going to cause issues down the road.

You also want to keep in mind... as you freeze transformations that this is happening before you're doing anything that needs those transformations. So, you know, things like rigging and locators and whatnot. But if you're using rigs and locators, then it's a matter of just parenting those meshes.

So moving on, the next thing that we want to do, and I will start with the body of the vehicle. So I will just select this body group that I have here. I will hit control one to isolate. And then now we have just the body of the vehicle.

I will select this vehicle and you can see we don't have any UVs here. So the next step is we have to generate initial UVs. So go to create and do camera based. These UVs typically don't matter.

We just need them to start the unwrapping process. If you go here to the right under the UV toolkit, you can see that we have create spherical, cylindrical, camera based and planar and all that. All of these are pretty much fine.

If you use cylindrical, planar, spherical, it really doesn't matter. Just do not use automatic. Because what automatic will do is just take all of these and split it into a bunch of different UV objects based off of the six planes here.

And we don't want that because we don't want to have to stitch and sew seams. So again, you're just going to select your mesh and do camera based. Now that we have camera based, I will start with something like this that's a bit more organic and a little bit more complex.

And we need to create our seams. So with this object selected, if we want this to unfold properly, we have to create seams. Now in order to do that, we have to separate this so it unfolds properly, I will hold right click, go into edge mode, and double click some edges here.

Now you can certainly work with the symmetry modifier if you'd like. But I'm just going to select these edges like so I guess selected the wrong one, it was actually down here. Alright, so I'm going to cut this piece off.

And then I'm going to go to the bottom of the door sill and cut this as well. Okay. Now I'm doing this.

So the front end here unfolds separately, and the back end will unfold separately. And then I want this set of edges here. Now, these edges selected, you can go to your UV editor, hold Shift, right click and then do cut. And then now that we've cut, you can see that it becomes bold and white and that now becomes a seam. So, for example, if I go to UV, double click our UVs here, you can see that now this is a separate UV shell.

The front end has also separated. And so we've created this nice separation between all these different panels here. And now that we've done that, We can move on to the next step, which is unwrap and unfold our UVs. So by simply selecting our mesh, going to the right here, and then selecting Unfold.

So scroll down until you get to Unfold, and then you have Unfold, and let it do its magic. And there you go. At this point in time, I would go through and better organize our UVs and just rotate them. You'll see that I'm not actually worrying about packing anything because that will happen in just a moment, but I want these to at least rotate nicely. Alright, and so once these have, I have these rotated in position, I can simply select this and go to layout.

And then there it goes. It goes ahead and packs everything into this one to one UV space. Now the nice thing is I can do that with the rest of my objects. Now, For these objects, you can see because these are separate pieces that I don't need seams.

I can easily select this door panel, hit unfold, and it'll do its thing. And I just rotate this into position and I can do that with the rest of the objects. So depending on your model, you may have an easier time if things are separated into different objects and it'll be a lot easier for you, you know.

once you're once you're doing the UVs. So I can now actually select everything, and then do again, and unfold and it'll go through and unfold everything. Now there may be some areas that need some extra work. So I'll then lay out so kind of neatly lays everything out and I can see everything. And then I can select this roof and start rotating objects.

So they're nice and plainer. You may be asking, Well, why does that matter? The reason why is because depending on your texture resolution, texture sizes, you may have to battle aliasing. So if your textures are at an angle, you'll get what's called, you know, aliasing and jaggies going up, you know, depending on how many pixels you have. So it's just a really nice thing to keep in mind as you're doing UVs and just keep them nice and straight and nice and planar.

So they can be, you know, 90 degrees or... in any direction, but this should be good enough. And then you can see we have our headlight details, which should have unfolded okay.

And then I can simply select all of this again and lay these out. So to recap these steps and these workflows, it's simply cleaning the model. So deleting history, freezing transforms, and deleting UVs.

Generate your initial UVs by using camera base. creating your seams with edge selection and then cut, and then unwrapping with unfold, and then packing and laying out. So now I can apply this workflow to essentially any other object within this model.

For example, for this mod kit that I have here, I can select all of the mesh. So make sure you don't select it by the group. You actually select it, marquee select the meshes in the viewport. And then I want to generate UVs because I've already gone through deleted history freeze transforms and deleted UVs. So I have to generate UVs.

Camera based. You can see it gets a little bit crazy there. No big deal. So we have all of these different mod kits and mod pieces here. And because these are pretty much separate, these will unfold nicely.

So I can now select these and then unfold. This unfold tool works really really well and gives you really nice results And of course, you know you go through and just kind of clean up the UVs here and this workflow applies to whether you're using things like 3ds max or softwares like 3ds max or even blender in 3ds max You know, it has a pelting and quick pelting and blender You're still gonna select seams and apply seams or mark seams as they call it in there And then you just use unwrap instead of unfold. All right, now here's something a little bit more complex. This is not going to unfold properly.

So we're going to apply that workflow again. So we've already cleaned the mesh, we've already generated UVs. Now let's go through and select our UVs.

So I will select UVs, like so. And I'm going to separate the this into three pieces, this front piece, this middle piece and this back piece here. And you can see I have these nice edges kind of running around.

the length of the mesh. So topology and edge flow makes this even easier. And then what I can do actually mean maximize this here, or this should be fine, this is maximized. And then I can select this edge running across and this edge here. Alright, so now that we have that this will separate into multiple pieces.

So I've now selected my seams and I want to cut my seams. So you can use cut here on the UV toolkit. or hold shift right click and do cut.

I like that because it's a little bit faster. Then you can select all of your UVs. So switch to UV mode, select all of your UVs by marquee select, and then unfold. And then watch that.

And it goes through and unfolds properly. And so you have these nice clean UVs. And everything looks really good.

And so we're going to go through and move these around. And we have that. So you can see, I will double check some things here and unfold or now that I have these unfolded, run a layout.

And you can see that these will properly position and scale. Now, of course, I want to check my checkerboard. So we're just focusing on the workflows.

But now that we have the workflow down, let's take a look at this with this checker view here, this checker map here. So hit this icon and you can see we have the checkerboard and the goal here is to have nice even squares. So for example, if I select this and for whatever reason, scale this, if I had transformed, you'd notice this, if it was scaled, you'd have long rectangles.

That's bad. Even though this unfolded properly, it scaled really far in one axis here. Now I don't want that.

So that's why you want to make sure just to hit that unfold, and then get those nice even squares, all right, and to prevent any any distortion. All right. So this is looking good. And we're applying this workflow, this five step workflow. But you can do something that's even easier.

All right. And something that's even easier. So I will grab the side view mirror here.

And I will hit Ctrl one to isolate. and we don't have any UVs. So if I create camera based UVs, we have this, okay.

And you can see it's one sided, so it does not have thickness on the inside because of the mirror that's blocking it, I can now take this and use the 3d cut and so tool. So if you thought the previous workflow was even easier, well, the 3d cut and so tool is even easier, I'm going to actually turn off checker view. And we're going to use that tool. So if you go to UV at the top, and go to 3d cut and so you'll see immediately it says drag to cut control drag to so meaning i can go in here if you drag with the left click like this you can just start selecting edges which is really nice or if i select edges like this by going down these edges here i can hold ctrl to remove those edges as well so that's the workflow that it's telling you Obviously, we want to make sure to focus on nice edge flow and edge loop.

And you can easily do that with double clicking. So if I double click this, look at that. It immediately has selected this edge and then cut this. So it combined our create seam step in essentially a couple of clicks. And then I can select the other portion here, this front portion.

So by double clicking that and let's say, oh, no, like I don't want these edges here. I don't want to split this. You can simply hold control and left click and it'll remove your seams.

And there you go. And then here I can finish this off by creating this nice kind of cap. So left clicking here, there, and then I can remove these and kind of clean these up.

And you can see it updating in the UV editor. So if we zoom out, take a look, you can see that we have this concave object essentially, that we need to split underneath. So unfolds. And once we do that, you know, you can hit Q to exit the tool, go back to object mode. and then unfold and there you go it unfolds really nicely and then we can take a look at the checkerboards even though these are at kind of at an angle that is perfectly fine so it's kind of giving you kind of this uh more of this radial effect but that's fine as long as your uvs are nice and even squares right so these are nice and clean and even squares so let's go and jump to a much more complex object like the tire So the tire here is a higher poly object and it is made for using that UV tool, the 3D UV tool.

So you can use either workflow. So now that we have a clean mesh, I will create and generate camera based UVs, turn off my checkerboard so I can see. And what I want to do is essentially separate the sidewall here from the top. So the sidewall, I apologize, is this, the front. And then this is the tread.

So I want to separate the sidewall from the tread. And I can easily do that with edge flow. And if I go to UV, actually, I have it here, right there. So the 3d cut and sew tool, if you want to add that to your shelf, you can go to UV, hold Ctrl Shift, and then left click 3d cut tool.

And then there you go, you can see that it's added. So I can right click and delete that since I already have it. Now that we have that I can now double click the edges that I want.

So I know because I have good clean topology and edge flow, I can separate our sidewall here. So if I double click this edge that runs all the way around, boom, it has created that as a nice separate UV shell. And then I can double click here. There you go.

And now we need to make sure that we have a seam running along the bottom, right? So the key thing to keep in mind when it comes to mastering UVs is if you ever have the cylindrical objects here, you need to have a seam somewhere running essentially perpendicular to the mesh. So because I have this, I want one running essentially perpendicular here.

So I can select these edges. Now you have to be careful. Because if I zoom in, you can see that it doesn't quite finish here.

And Actually, if I want to include this bead here, I can. So I'll just double click with left click, add this edge here with left click, hold control left click. So you can see how easy it is to add and remove seams.

So I've added that seam. And then I'm going to go through and do that on the front. So I have this tire bead here. And I'm first going to add the right seam. So I double click these edges there, control click to remove the seam, double click.

And then I can control click double or just maybe control click like so. All right. So we get that.

Make sure I didn't miss anything. We're going to get real close here. So that's looking good.

With our seams in place, we just want to select the tire. Hold right click, go into UV mode or leave it in object mode and just simply unfold. So you can do that if you're kind of working in UVs. You can like separately select.

UVs and unfold them or you can simply select the entire mesh and it'll re unfold the entire mesh. And there you go. So this worked out really well, and is really nice. And you can imagine this 3d cut. And so tool is going to speed up workflow significantly, right and then now I can hit layout.

And there you go. Looking good. So we can continue that workflow on something like this tire.

or excuse me this wheel rim where I will apply camera based so we have camera based uvs and with camera based uvs I can now start selecting my seams so again you could if I wanted to use the other workflow like if you're just kind of experimenting you can double click this edge here and this edge here on the inside of the wheel drum and we can kind of run and select maybe this edge, maybe this edge here. Alright, so we've selected all those. So same thing applies to this workflow, right?

I need to make sure my UVs connect, excuse me, my seams connect. And this is looking good. So I have the one running all the way around to separate the inside of the drum.

I have the seam running along the bottom. perpendicular to this flow. And then now I can go into here and cut and then go to UV mode. And I can separate these and I can separately unfold this piece here.

So again, you can use either workflow. So you can see I can actually use a combination here. And now I will use the same thing I will use UV.

And then I'll use the 3d cut tool. And then we can start separating. the rest of the mesh here.

So I will select probably here on the outside of that drum, the inside of this drum here. And because I have good edge flow, I can continue to select. Now, don't worry, I'm going to cover a technique that I'll select using different methods and not edges, right?

If you have a more complex or let's say a triangulated mesh and whatnot. But this is working well, I can continue to work my way around. And it's really nice because I can just kind of, you know, select and immediately create those seams. And they're fully visualized by giving me this white, bold look here. And I can do the inside piece.

And remember, you have to separate things. It's just good practice to separate things that have thickness from inside and outside. So I can, you know, select this piece here. And, you know, you can also think about it, you know, if I left-click.

this edge, this edge, this edge that runs up to the front there. So I like that. You know, you can think about it like, you know, a lot of times like a complex orange, right?

You're just kind of creating more and more seams, the more complex your objects are. So this should help visualize and what I always recommend to if you're, you know, it comes with practice, but if you're like, how do I know which seams to select, I'm just separating the front from the back of this wheel rim. So you can see the front set of faces here from the back set of faces and just using this edge flow here, I'm separating this drum fate set of faces from this outside, and then I have this right. And that just allows things to unfold properly. Right?

Now, with that, I might have to add more seams. I'm not sure. So I'll go to object mode, you'll kind of see me kind of do this live, hit unfold.

and let it do its thing and it unfolded and then hit layout let's see how things look and things are looking pretty good right and it unfolded and you can see that all right well if i go into checker mode you can see it kind of gives me this kind of radial look and now look at these stretching of these uvs this is what i mean right because this cylindrical object does not have a seam right i need to add uh one that runs perpendicular to this edge flow, meaning I have, so if I turn off the edge flow, this is what I mean by perpendicular, right? These are my edge rings running this way, right? And my edge loops, and I want a perpendicular edge to cut that. So it's kind of this 90 degree here. So I'll go ahead now and select this edge and run that all the way up.

to here and I'm not in 3d cut tool, no problem, just select your edges and cut. And there you go. You can also select your edges right within the UV editor. Meaning if it's like things are pretty complex and pretty messy, I can just select this edge, jump to my editor view or UV editor, double click this edge and look at that it stops it right where the seams are. So that's also a nice thing that you can do.

So select this edge, hit cut, double click this UV editor. and hit unfold and it'll unfold nicely. Now you'll notice there's a slight bend and whatnot in these and for the most part that is completely fine. The only time you need perfectly straight UVs is when you have a noticeable tile or noticeable pattern like a fabric pattern or you know wood pattern and whatnot.

Take a look at one of my other tutorials where I actually cover that in further detail where I show how to make perfectly straight UVs. And here oh crap you know i missed this edge here no problem right we're doing this live and trying to figure out you know all these workflows as we go so i missed this edge and then i can select it hold shift right click cut that and there you go right because this is what's going to happen most of the time most of the time things aren't going to unfold perfectly perfectly so you're going to have to find these edges and kind of recut them and resell them so Now that we have this right, I want to take a look at distortion, right? So things may look good here, I would say, you know, I have this checker view and things are starting to look okay. But if you go to view mode, and go to UV distortion here, we can see what starts to happen, right, we can see that we're getting a little bit of blue, we're getting a little bit of red, and a little bit of blue and little bit of red is okay, for the most part, a little bit of tense here and there. Right.

And the way that, you know, right, is when you scale up, it means it's being stretched. Right. And if it's being scaled in, it's being squashed.

Right. So with with that, knowing that the way to alleviate distortion, there's no trick. It's just more seams.

Right. I'm not going to go in here and start massaging UVs and starting to use relax in specific areas. That is an absolute waste of time. Honestly, right so I can turn off my checkerboard turn off my UV distortion Actually, you can just hit 7 on your keyboard and then now we can just start to add more seams so what I want to do now is go to UV 3d cut and so tool and I can run this edge and kind of separate this part of the wheel from the front wheel Right, and if I wanted to I can say you know what now that I have this You know, I can select this edge that's running all the way down. Oops, it looks like I kind of missed that here.

But for the sake of this demo, I'll just kind of run that here to right about here. So I double click that edge that runs all the way. And I can now select this, move it off. And if we turn on hit seven again to look at distortion, unfold this. There you go.

You see how now that let me undo and redo that, right, we have this quite a bit of red here. And then I unfold, and we have less distortion, right. And if I select this, I can re unfold this with this. And it helps alleviate some of that. If you wanted to, like, you know, I've looked at some materials and whatnot on here, this is fine.

I don't need to push this any further. But if you absolutely want to write in with seven on the keyboard, I can, you know, start to select these edges here, right? So we're kind of mixing workflows and whatnot.

So I can select these inside edges here. And there we go. I think I got the right ones.

And I can cut these off. So now we have this separate. Oops, looks like I missed something here. No big deal.

I can, you know, select these. edges. So you know, you could if you want to run these across, if you so want to, and just further add more UVs and seams. Alright, so cut that.

And then now I should be able to easily separate these and unfold. And we get something like that, right. And if I hit seven on my keyboard, you know, you can start to see I'm getting less and less red here. So the goal here when it comes to UVs is to just continue to add seams right here you can see it's really dark blue really dark red no problem I'm going to select these edges that run along the inside and separate these bolt holes here like so and go into here and cut these perfect hit seven look at our distortion you Unfold as we go. And we've separated that.

That's helped alleviate that redness. And blue. And unfold these. And, you know, if you want, you can do the cap.

But because this cap on the inside is going to be hidden by bolts here, I'm fine. I can leave these as is. All right? So that, you know, is pretty much the workflow here for unwrapping objects.

Okay? Now, one thing you can do. is, you know, I have this brake caliper that has a lot of detail and whatnot.

And I don't want you guys to be like afraid of using some quick and easy and dirty methods. Because what matters is what is the material type going to be right? Also context, if this is going to be used in, you know, a game engine or a different type of engine that needs cleaner UVs, then definitely go in and start separating these inner portions and separating.

them from the rest of the object, but For this, I can select this and this would be a fine time to use automatic, right? Because this is a very planar object and I can get a pretty good looking set of UVs right off the bat, right? And I don't need to really do anything else. If I wanted to be very particular about the seams, then I would go through and manually unwrap it. But you know, if you're like here, let me move closer, right?

And I can select these edges, right? I just kind of want to show you the other method of using auto unwrap and then stitching them. So I can select these and then I can do stitch together.

And boom, look at that, right? So, you know, but again, be careful. I wouldn't spend so much time using auto unwrap and stitching UVs.

Honestly, I would just select my seams, unfold and move on, right? But. because I know this is going to have like this noisy caliper material, this bumpy caliper material painted look, auto UVs are fine, right with procedural materials. Okay, so just keep that in mind that sometimes auto map automatic UVs are perfectly fine. Okay.

So the next thing that I want to cover is, you know, applying this workflow to something that has a lot of repeatable objects, right. So for example, we have this simple grill piece here. All right. And you can see these are exactly the same mesh. I took this mesh, copied, duplicated, and moved it.

Right. But the thing is I didn't unwrap it before I moved on. Well, this is where we can use something called transfer attributes.

So since I have these UVs here and they have camera based UVs on them already, I can go through now and let's use our 3d cut tool or UV tool. And I can, you know, double click and start selecting these here and I can run these edges across and of course I mean I don't have symmetry on but you can use the modeling toolkit here and enable symmetry if you'd like on world x or whatever is your symmetry access right so I'll undo that and If I go back here, I'm going to show you what I mean. So if I hit World C, now move this off, or actually I can like put it in here with the UV toolkit, and I have to redo that scene.

So if I jump back to modeling toolkit, symmetry, world X, so X is my line of symmetry. I'm going to run this all the way across and then double click this, right and this will save me a few clicks when adding seams on symmetrical objects. And there you go. I don't have to do it on both sides.

So definitely work with symmetry if you can. And I will select these now and jump back to my editor or UV toolkit. And hold Shift right click unfold, unfold, unfold. And there you go.

Right, so we get these nice UVs. Here you can see this little box here and you know I can select these. It gets a little bit annoying when you're trying to manipulate UVs.

So no big deal. You know you can always turn that off once you've got your seams in place and whatnot. So I can put these back and hit layout and it'll pack these all.

You know just to be nice and neat I'll rotate these in position. That looks good and Now, of course, I can manually do that for each one of these objects. But to save time, I'm going to select these, this object here, okay, and I'm going to delete history. And I want to open up mesh transfer attributes.

Now, make sure to grab the dialog settings. So open up the dialog. And then here are the settings.

All right. Now, these are the settings that you want to use. But if you haven't used these before. I will just reset settings and I'll show you which ones that I always use.

So what I want to transfer over since these objects are the same is I want to use UV sets, hit all, good. I don't need color sets so that can be off. And then I want to sample space, I want to use component here. All right, this is off for mirroring or mirroring, flip UVs is off and that should be all I need. So just make sure really you have UV sets set to all.

and then component enabled. So with that, if I zoom out, you can see that these, you know, already have existing camera based UVs, but I can select this object first, and I want to transfer it to this object. So hit apply. Boom, there you go.

Look at that. And then now you can select this main object here, the parent object or the original object, I should say, select the next one and hit apply. Boom. Then you can select all of these, delete history.

And relay these out. There you go. Like magic.

So that's not so bad when you have, you know, one or two or I should say two or three objects you want to transfer UVs. The challenge comes when you have something like this. So I got these bolts here.

And guess what? I have one, two. I have about 10 on this fender here. 10 here.

10 here. I have about 40 of these bolts. And I can go through and if we quickly unwrap this, so I'll hit control one to isolate. Got this nice little sub D bolt.

So it's going to subdivide nicely if I want to go that crazy and subdivide bolts. But I will hit UV, actually just go into my 3D UV, start selecting my seams. Edge flows nice and clean.

This will work for my needs. Separate this back piece. And run this edge along here.

All right, there we go. Hit Q to exit the tool. Go back to object mode.

Hit unfold. Bam, look at that. Easily unwrapped, okay?

Now that was easily unwrapped, but I do not want to do that 40 times, okay? Nor do I want to transfer attributes 40 times, right? Because the annoying thing is, I can't tell that this is the original object and I want to transfer it to all 40, right?

So let me just hit layout here. And I got that and this would be the time like if you want to be real meticulous about your UV rotation Make sure all of this is done before you hit transfer attributes. Everything's looking good. I like it minor adjustments on and so forth Cool hit layout again.

We're good Now if I go to my mod kit go to this group, it's all of these cylinders here All right, so I can you know select this here Again, all of these already have like camera based UVs and whatnot. But if I select this object than the next object and hit the transfer attributes here, so I go back to mesh transfer attributes, and bring this over and hit apply. Boom, that works.

But again, I don't want to do this 40 times, right? Right. No problem. What I want to refer you to, and I'll put this in the description down below is a lot of times you know, other artists are going through this and you can find scripts of people that ran into similar issues. So how to transfer UVs from one object to multiple similar objects.

And here we have Nicholas Morlant, sorry if I pronounced your name wrong, and he has this script here that he got from somebody else from Nestor Prado. And that is from this Tumblr link right here. Okay, so he went and, you know, has a script that does this.

And I just referenced the ArtStation because it's a nice, easier copy. So what you want to do is just grab this here. This is a key thing to keep in mind.

This is a Python script. Grab this script, control, or excuse me, just right-click it. So I'm going to copy the script.

I will now go to my script editor. So bottom right corner, there's this little tiny icon for your script editor. Hit that to open. And then now we want to create this script and paste it in here. We know this is a Python script.

So we want to make sure we're in Python, then right click or just hit Ctrl V. And there you go. Now, the easy thing is you can simply paste the script in here, and then use this option, save script to shelf. And you can see I've already done that. So I'll do that again.

So I can hit save script to shelf, I'll just call this, you know, I'll just call test because I'm going to delete it and hit OK. And there you go, boom, it puts it right into your shelf. So I'll move this over.

And now watch this. So just for a quick test, I want to select this and then the other cylinder, and I will do transfer UV, boom, it works. Now, if I select this, and then like all of the other ones, so you know, you want to just control click all of these, right.

And you can try to use marquee select to but sometimes it might not know the right order, but this should work and watch this transfer. Boom, done, just like that, right? So then now... You can see that I also have these. Actually, these were all of these here.

So I've already done it on these 20 here. Keep in mind, actually, it's not this one. I should move this out of this mod kit. This is a keyhole because it does not match the bolt topology.

In order for this to work, it has to be a one-to-one and match perfectly with the UVs and vertices. Or not UVs and vertices, but vertices. You can see the keyhole is just a little bit different. All right. So now that I have that, you know, I can select this object, go to the other one that's been essentially mirrored over, and I can start selecting all of these.

Now, you know, worst case worse, if you copy it over, and use transfer attributes for an object that's not the same, then it'll just like, say, Oh, you know, didn't work. But I'll deselect that there. Alright, so you have that. I'll use the transfer the script there you go you now have all of these cylinders here all of these bolts perfectly unwrapped you know so I can select these and deselect whatever I don't want I don't want my keyhole and there we go and I need to make sure I hit delete history right because it's also you know it transferred the UVs but you in order to pack these if you use packing you'll notice that it's not going to pack properly because I need to delete history. So delete history, then hit layout, and then watch.

Boom, like magic, right? So very helpful. Big thanks to the guys that put this out there and is sharing it with everybody.

Obviously, the original author, you know, very helpful here. So thank you for sharing that. Nestor Prado.

And then thanks for sharing that on ArtStation, Nicholas Moreland. So these scripts are super nice to you know, go through something repetitive like this and unwrap all of these same objects Alright, so we're making good progress here and the next thing that I want to show so I have these mod kits Right and the key thing that I wanted to show you is this where you can see I have my body and then I have Mod kit in a separate set of UVs. Now the mod this is important because the mod kits are the same material as the body, but sometimes they'll be on a different UV set. Or, you know, let's say, if I actually go back to my original reference here, you know, and I modeled it based off of, again, Sun Kang's model or mod. But if I wanted to create like a non-modded version, the original one here, and I want to slap mods on later or different mods, right, then those will be completely separate objects and potentially be on separate UV sets.

Well, the thing is, if I select all of these objects here. Actually, I want to make sure that I only have the body here. So I have the body. And then I'm going to grab the all of the mod kit sheet metal or body paint. And, you know, I'll leave I'll leave that there with the plastic piece, but this is fine.

Right. So I have these. And with the body, right, you can see that these are packed here.

And if I hit this, icon here for checker map. Watch what happens when I select all of these. Get in closer and you'll notice that the checkers for the sheet metal, the main body, is different size than the fender flares right and all of the mod kits.

This will cause issues right. It might be small but when you get in close guess what's going to be a repeatable pattern is paint flakes right or anything that has noise. or anything that has a repeatable pattern.

The last thing you want is to have two objects that are supposed to have the same material properties have different UV coordinates. Well, this is where part of mastering UVs is understanding textile density. Okay, meaning if I now take this object, and I say, Okay, I like these bodies, you want to grab what's been packed, and the larger objects here.

So this will work for what I need. and select any one of these objects that have been laid out, right? So you select these objects, lay them out, and we're good to go there.

Now, a key thing you need to understand about actually the layout tool, if I go to modify layout so and hit the dialog box, I am using default settings. And if you want, you can change this if you know that you're going to have a 512, a 1024 or 2048 map. If I say, you know, I know for sure I'm going to have 2048. Meaning, you know, I'll have 2048 pixels.

You can hit pixels here and give yourself a little bit of padding. And I typically give myself two pixels of shell padding. And then from there, I can, you know, now hit apply and hit layout UVs or just hit layout UVs and that'll apply those settings there. And then now this has been packed and there's this nice padding here of two pixels.

Previously, if there wasn't, sometimes, you know, in older versions of Maya, these UVs will be literally right on top of each other and you don't want that, right? So by having this two pixel shell padding, that gives you exactly what you want. and everything looks good right now again like for example these will are supposed to be on a different uv set so they're not going to be packed to that but what you can do is select the main or the master model here that has everything packed and you want to go up to transform and scroll down to get and set okay so get so git tells you the textual density of this object.

So if I hit get here, you can see it's 1.1. It's using a map size of 512. That's fine as long as this remains consistent. Then if I select now, what's in my modkit group here, and select all of these objects, great, I can have these be on a different UV set like this, then hit set, and then boom.

Now, if I select and look at everything, I have these on two completely different UV sets and texture sets, but the textile density is the same between them. And this is very, very important when you have things that are multiple materials and that need to be the same textile density. Okay. So that's really good to know and a real good tool to have in your arsenal.

Now, the next thing I want to show you is when edge flow. isn't gonna work or if you need to, if you want to use a different method. For example, I'll take this little door handle here.

You can see, you know, pretty complex and, you know, the way that I have things modeled and these edges, you know, it's not a perfect selection, right? So let me turn off checker faces here. So what I'm getting at is I will generate camera based UVs here.

So if you go, let me minimize transform, do camera base. And from here, I want to create UVs but not use edge selection. Well, I like to use, you know, in the modeling toolkit that I have docked here, I can use selection constraint angle. Now with angle, you want to set it to something relatively low, depending on the density of your mesh. And I can use something like 10 or 15. And I'll maybe bump this up to 15. And then watch this.

I can now select by faces. And you might say, okay, well, that's great. But now how do I create this as a UV? If you go here now into your UV editor, hold shift right click to create UV show.

And look at that. It selects these faces and creates this as a completely separate UV show, right? And I can drop this down to maybe something like 10 here.

And I want to do face selection. There we go, because it was set to element selection. But and I can grab these faces here now, like this. And I've used this for things that, you know, if I'm using someone else's model, or I've downloaded a model for a project, and I need to unwrap the UVs, but the topology and edge flow is crap and messy, right?

So here, this is a good example of how you can use, you know, edge or face selection, polygon selection to create UV shells. So with all of these selected now, I've created these as UV shells, I can go back to my UV editor toolkit or UV toolkit and hit unfold. And there you go.

Just like that. Another easy way to generate UVs on objects that aren't as perfect, right? So angle select is crucial and really nice and gives you great results here.

So I like that and I'll hit layout and it'll use my new settings that I have. And I can then take this. It's like, oh, I have two door handles. I don't want to go through that all over again, right?

So I select this mesh. I select both of them actually. Delete history.

Select this as my parent object or original object. Sorry for saying parent. Original object. And then shift click the second object that I want to copy it to. Go to mesh.

Transfer attributes. These are the settings that I'm using. and hit apply then there you go boom all right so this works nicely and it's really easy and gives me what i want Now the one thing I also want you to keep in mind is if you have these objects here, like this, and well, I don't want to do that.

But I'll relay these out. And let's say you don't even have these over here. And if you delete these, and you want to just straight up mirror this, I can, you know, select this mirror, and I can grab my channel box editor. So I'll go ahead and dock that in here with all my other panels, hit delete history.

And I can mirror this over negative scale, you have to keep in mind that when you do that you have a negative scale on an object, it may cause issues, you know, when you take it into other softwares and other render engines, okay, I know it's just actually a little bit off, but this is fine for what I'm doing. And what you need to do to fix that is just make sure to freeze transforms. after you've mirrored it over freeze transforms then go back to UV toolkit and unfold those objects okay so now if I go to unfold and then it'll properly unfold these objects and I'll make sure my normal direction my surface normals my faces and everything are all in the right direction okay so you know that's what you need to do there So I mean, I have these actually, you know, parented, but I can delete the original one.

Oops, looks like I deleted the wrong one. So let me just undo here real quick. Alright, there we go. And I can, you know, hit duplicate, freeze transformations on my symmetry axis.

And then once I have negative scale, freeze transformation, select the side view mirror, and then go back to my UV toolkit and unfold and everything will be oriented properly. So just make sure that if you're mirroring stuff that that is the what you have to do. Now the other thing to keep in mind is when it comes to text and textures. So text as in like words and fonts and stuff, you don't want to use symmetry.

So if I go to my wheels here, I have this set of wheels here and I'll just group these so the parent pivot is at the world origin and let's say I do a negative scale watch what happens right if I do that it kind of really messes things up and look at that the Fuguzi here is flipped and in the wrong direction right and this is going to cause issues guess what anywhere else that you have text meaning your sidewalls If you have like a nice like, you know, Michelin, Bridgestone or off road text tires here, and you flipped it with negative x but didn't re unfold it. Guess what, I've seen this in a lot of people's models where the text is reading backwards. Okay, so the easy thing to do, you know, is to if I hide that, you know, when you duplicate the object here, let me undo.

then kind of go back here. So you have this object, you would, you know, Ctrl D duplicate, then you would move this, and then rotate it 180 degrees. Okay, so that's another method that you can do. Now, if you want this perfect, right, so let's say I didn't, I didn't do this previously, the method that I use is just use the reference tire like this, where I'll duplicate scale, and then I'll take this object here, the actual tire. and rotate it 180 degrees.

Then I will grab this tire for reference and I'll use this align tool. So the align selection, it's also under modify align tool. It's just a nice little 3d gizmo that you can use to align your, your, your models. And there you go.

And then I can delete this once I have this as a reference and there you go. And this is actually how they do it in the real world, right? We can't mirror things and flip things on. a mirrored axis.

So we have to physically take this object, this wheel and rim, move it and rotate it and put it in position and bolt it on. And so everything is going to look proper when you do that. Okay, so what I'll do now is hide the demo version and bring in the final version.

And let's say like, you know, you have this where you have all your materials and your texture sets, your material sets and everything ready to go. but you want to do a final pass of it right you can of course select the mesh here right and look at the checkers but if you want to use your own custom checker then i highly recommend you know you go to this uv texture by veil and you can create your own procedural own different version of textures which is super nice you know you can use presets here or you know you can just create your your own versions it's super nice so definitely take a look at this tool it's nice and you can create your own custom versions right so if you want to use custom texture maps, what you can do is, and you don't want to overwrite all your materials here, just use render layers, right? So I'm going to use the render setup here.

And I'll show you how I quickly do this with the new one. So I will create a new render layer. And you know, I'll call it UV layer demo.

So just use that icon to create a new layer, right click this layer now and create a collection. All right. And this will be Geo Collection 2. So this is any of your geometry lights or cameras would go in here. And then I can just select this.

That's a UV final. Middle mouse drag this into this collection here. Then on this collection, right click, do Create Material Override.

And you can do, I'll just do UV Demo, Material Override, and open up your Hypershade. You can see I already have one, but just in case, I will scroll down and create a nice, simple Lambert material. So left click Lambert, zoom in here, and we will go to color, hit the color dialog option and hit file.

And I will simply find my UV checkerboard. So I already have this that I really like to use. So I hit open and there you go.

So this is now here. right and I can call this you know, M underscore, you know, UV demo. Now that I have that you can select the place texture node here.

And let's first actually apply this. Okay, so you know, losing a little bit of real estate, but it's fine. I'll move my render setup here, because now I need both of these. Because I need to middle mouse drag my new demo material on this override material.

So middle mouse drag this and if you're using older version of Maya, just make sure to override drag it over the word override, otherwise it won't link properly. How do you know it linked properly, you have a black arrow for the output connections. Otherwise, it'll just this is bug in older versions where it doesn't actually connect.

Okay, so once you do that, you can actually I'll just use attribute editor for this. And then we can now jump into right we have the final version here, I can hit this and now you can see Alright, cool. So we're making good progress.

Now I can change the tiling of this if I hit Ctrl A. And you need to select the material. So, you know, if you're not sure, I mean, you can actually just select the mesh. And you go to UV demo here, go to color, output connections, place 2D textures. And you can change this to like whatever you want, 10 by 10, or 20 by 20, I think is what I used.

for the intro there. Okay. So this is how you can double check and review with kind of your own custom grid and make sure things are looking good.

But don't forget to use, you know, this checkered view here with distortion with seven on your keyboard, just to make sure you do that final pass and final clean version there. Oops, I hit seven in the viewport, which is lighting mode. So, but six. Five will take you to non textured version, six on your keyboard will take you to textured, seven lighting, no lighting, so I'll stay up with six.

Just make sure one of the final things is to keep in mind as you know you're going through and creating UVs, it all starts with edge flow and topology, right? A lot of people may say well that's unfolding a lot easier than my models or models that I found online. It's because of the edge flow and topology.

When you have that in mind, Now if I actually switch back to my master layer, all of my materials are here. Now what I'm getting at is if your edge flow is good, then your UVs will be so much easier. So spend the time having nice, neat, and clean UVs and edge flow, which will lead to nice, clean UVs.

It all trickles down, and it all trickles down to the next part, which is going to be texturing materials. shading rigging animation and so on and so forth you guys know how i like topology so you know, make sure to check out my other videos here, where I cover a lot more UVs. So I cover how to UV map complex objects. And this is the one I was talking about UV mapping curved surfaces. So that's the one if you need really specific UVs.

And then if you want to send, you know, you can share this video or just send this one here, which is just using map anything in five minutes, I don't use the 3d cut tool. or the 3D UV tool. I just stick to the previous workflow or the original workflow, but either way, that'll get people going. And then of course, I have my entire free series up on YouTube of how to start from scratch with modeling a 3D car. So I start with a cube and curves and take you all through the process.

The other thing to wrap up is a lot of people were asking about the model. So I will be putting this model up for sale for you to download. So... I'll put it up for sale, and then within the first week, watch my YouTube, watch my Instagram.

I'm going to be putting out a coupon code to get 50% off the model that first week. You will also receive free updates. If you buy it once, I plan to fully materialize this with Maya, V-Ray, Arnold, and I also plan to use Blender and Blender Cycles. That'll come down the road, but if you buy it now, you're going to have...

all those free updates. I'll make sure to include that in on my art station. So there's always links in the description.

But you know, you can take a look at my art station here. Now I have my portfolio, and then my store here, which I'm going to start adding more models for cheap, you know, I keep all my models really, really cheap for everyone to download. And then I have a gumroad if if gumroads your thing. So okay, so I hope this was helpful. I didn't unwrap everything.

from beginning to end. But I'm telling you, this is the workflow that I use to unwrap this entire model, like I said, in less than an hour. So I really hope you found this helpful.

If you guys got any other tips, throw them down in the comments. Honestly, like when I put my original UV mapping tutorial, somebody says, hey, you should use the 3D cut tool, the 3D, what is it? The 3D cut and sew tool.

And I said, oh yeah, I'll take a look. And I took a look at that. I was like, oh man, this is really good. So. Definitely save some time.

I always appreciate your guys'insights. You know, I've been doing this for a while, but, you know, there's so many things changing. So throw them down below. Always appreciate feedback. So take care and I will see you all around.

Transcript for:Essential Guide to UV Mapping Techniques

Transcript for:
Essential Guide to UV Mapping Techniques