I finished the modeling on the logo. There really wasn’t much left. I just needed to add a couple of items to stand in for a pencil line and an ink line. The most challenging bit for those was probably their size. They needed to be long but very skinny. And now, with all the modeling complete, it’s time to move on to the UV layouts for this project.
I have been watching the tutuorial course at Digital Tutors called “Texturing Game Props in 3ds Max and Photoshop” so I first finished watching the last few videos. I found this to be a really good course. It’s not too long, only 15 sections, and it covers the whole process for creating and using UVs. It steps through creating the UV map, working with the UV layout to get it just right, setting up the layout so that it exports properly, exporting the UV map, importing it into Photoshop, creating the texture in Photoshop, and then getting the whole thing back into 3ds Max and onto the model. It even covers an occlusion map as well as an ambient occlusion map. Both of which I did not have a complete understanding of prior to the tutorial. And a topic I will save for another time.
With the video complete and a whole afternoon open and unspoken for I was ready to tackle the UV layouts for this project. I started with the pencil end since it’s just two objects. I had a little trouble getting my UV map at first. Apparently, some of the specifics of the tutorial did not stick with me, either that or they were not spelled out and I wasn’t watching close enough. But, getting the UV map requires you to explicitly choose the object you want maps for. I found I was best off to use the object selection not just the element selection. So I could select the object from my scene explorer but that wasn’t quite enough. I had to select it there and then use the object selection item in the modify window to select the object. Then when I added the UVW Map modifier, it behaved properly.
The UVW Map modifier defaults to a planar map which really doesn’t work for this project since everything is made of cylinders. I changed the map type to cylinder and then I right-clicked on the UVW Map modifier and collapsed it to the object. This sort of bakes the map or modification into the object so now, that base object, has the additional attribute of the UVW Map. From this point it was a matter of adding the Unwrap UVW modifier and clicking the “Open UV Editor” button.This is where the hard work comes in.
If you have created your map properly then when you open the UV Editor window you see bunch of shapes in a little box. These are the UVs all squashed together and stacked on top of each other. First thing you have to do is to flatten the map but you have to remember to select everything. Once you do this then you see all the bits laid out in that little window much like a sewing pattern. It would be really nice if instead of sectioning out the cylinder into 4 strips the process would just unwrap it in one piece. But it doesn’t. The reason this would be nice has to do with seams.
I would surmise that seams are the bane of any 3d artist who uses UV textures. You have the same problem with them as you would in sewing. Have you ever seen a shirt with a pattern that when you looked across the seam it was totally off. If it was stripes then they didn’t match up and it was all messy and askew. Same thing happens with UVs. If your UV is for an object you might see in everyday life, say a mug, then you probably don’t want lots of seams to have to match up because you want your texture to look smooth and consistent. Unfortunately, with UVs you will always have some seams. The trick is to have as few as realistically possible and to hide or disguise the ones you do have.
In the case of the pencil, I ended up with four sections for the barrel and the pointy end, plus two extra sections to complete the circumference of the pointy end, and a section for each end cap of the pencil.
This was my first attempt at a final UV layout. I connected the two extra pointy end sections but had not thought about the part where I was going to want to eliminate the seams so there are way more sections here than there should be. Now, if I were doing something completely different with the textures of each section I might have wanted to leave this. I’m not. I would like it all pretty even.
I did manage to get a few sections of the model UV mapped and unwrapped before I realized that I needed to actually connect those sections together. So, to take the sewing example a bit further, I stitched the appropriate sections together to get rid of the seams. I could see on the preview window when I had got it right because I no longer had extra glowing green stripes along a section of my model. Yes, it really is called stitching in the UV editor. The menu selection I used is called “Stitch selected”.
There was a bit of fiddling with things to get the layout to look nice. There is a relax command that is a little like if you were smoothing out a sewing pattern. Though if you choose the wrong option it can act a little more like you wadded up the pattern in frustration.
This is a better UV layout for the pencil than the original one. You can see I now have only 3 pieces to deal with which means I will only have 3 seams. With some luck they won’t be too noticeable.
This process has to be done for every component of this model. Then I will combine what I can to a single UV layout for Photoshop where I will send it to for creating the textures. So a few more steps.