okay a lot of people over the years have asked me how I do UVW unwrapping so I'm
gonna narrate over this video where I am doing some unwrapping for some furniture
I'm just gonna describe the process it's actually a lot simpler than you might
think. There's a couple simple principles that
you have to keep in mind one is you want to do your unwrapping when your polygons
are as simple as possible. That makes it a lot easier to select everything and
you'll see in this video that a lot of the hard work is done which is selecting
and isolating different areas so what you want to do is find seams, find
naturally-occurring seams and this furniture it's easy because there's some
grooves on the arm of the chair that represent where two pieces of wood would
come together so obviously there will be a seam in the material there they won't
line up across those seams so those are naturally occurring seams I'm going to
select everything between those two seams and unwrap it together so that the
wood all matches the grain all matches in this area that I'm selecting it can
be unwrapped as an individual object and then the other objects don't have to
necessarily line up with it because they want it in real life so that's one thing
you have to consider is that like with furniture especially fabric there will
be naturally occurring seams in certain places and that's where you want to put
your seams for your textures as well for your materials okay so I'm just
selecting using basic poly tools so I selected the middle and then grew out
from there and I picked up some ones I didn't necessarily want in this segment
of the unwrap so I'm just deleting those now and then I'm going to detach which
is just a tool inside of polygon and I'm detaching that as its own element and
this just makes it so it's easy to select later so now I've got in my
element selection mode I can select these different elements I've created
which is great I'm going to hide unselected there or hide selected sorry
and then that just makes it easier for me to work with what is remaining I'm
just investigating my model and everything looks clean
and good at this point now I just unhidden see the whole thing and it's
time to put on the UVW unwrapped modifier once we've got our different
areas selected that we want and you can see that it automatically put seams now
at where the elements come together those green lines are seams form UVW
unwrapping if I make it so I select the whole element at once
then you can see those elements that I've detached from each other which is
fantastic and if I lock in that selection see if I can figure it out
here yeah so move that away from the others now and then select the next
element and do the same all my objects are isolated from each other and what I
just did was hit the quick peel button which is over there under peel with a
little lightning bolt on it and that just kind of lays out all the objects
individually and kind of flattens them but you can see you can't flatten the
two because then they'll be overlap in UV so what I need to do is create
another seam on this by selecting an edge and I want to put it somewhere
where it's not gonna be noticeable or look distracting and right underneath of
that arm is fine I can then just do a simple Luqman and it selects all of them
and then you hit break to create a seam there so now you see that purple line
going along that seam that that's now broken there which means those vertices
are no longer welded together so when I peel it it now flattens out entirely
when those are still connected it'll just flatten the tube on top of itself
which doesn't really work but if you cut that seam now I can flatten out flat and
we now have a nicely unwrapped object we need to do the same thing with this
other element select an edge loop along that edge like that and then go to the
break tool
and then quick peel it again now we've got to unwrapped arms of that chair what
I'm going to do now is put a simple checker material on it so that we can
see what that unwrap is looking like I'm gonna change the tiling on that checker
make sure it's visible in viewport and then apply it to my chair you can see
the two that I've already unwrapped are working quite well that back piece isn't
working well because it is not unwrapped properly yet setting the tiling to 20
and 20 make sure those checkers are showing up basically as squares on your
object even that front piece looks pretty nice but it actually got
overlapping faces because it doesn't have that extra seam in there yet so
let's do that now I'm going to select an edge and then loop it just like normal
polyethylene editing we need another one down here so that everything can unwrap
and lay down flatly so once we've got that selected hit break or explode and
then select that element and peel it just like that now we've got that wood
or that checkerboard wrapping completely around that front leg which is perfect
now here we'll have to add three seams I'll show you how we handle this we have
the regular seam here so let's select that and loop it
loop this one up here and then break it and peel it but you can see at the top
it's getting a little squished that's because we need another seam up there so
I'll figure that out here in a second okay so everything's working except the
top obviously we need another seam up here loop okay it's going up into that
top piece which we'll have to handle a little bit differently we can break
these to make the seam okay so you can see it's still not unwrapping perfectly
at the top still a little squished working slightly better but right there
is where it doesn't work that's because we need some way to flatten out this top
part and what we should really do is just detach it entirely from the rest of
the chair so let's select it what you can do is go to the planar mapping which
will just split that off as its own object just like that make it go on the
x-axis alignment so now it's just it just broke it off into its own element
essentially scale it down to the same proportion that's the rest of it you can
see now it's getting nice mapping up on top and the benefit is now we don't have
anything that's gonna be squishing this other leg up so we can peel it again
quick peel and now it flattens out as you can see and now the checkers are
looking quite nice on that whole chair the top is its own separate object up
there everything looks good pretty basic pretty simple this isn't all the tools
that you'll ever need but with those basic principles and
those basic tools it becomes a lot more confusing and a lot more simple to do
basic UVW unwrapping in my opinion with just those basic things I'm able to do
90 percent of all UVW unwrapping that I
ever need to do so check those out learn those basic things remember make nice
selections detach them as elements and think about where seams should go so
that things can lay down flatly remember like on the top of that chair if you
have a big flat spot like that and the seam is going up to that there's really
no way to physically make that without just kind of squishing it into a ball so
that's where you need to think okay let's detach this other piece up here
and then the whole thing will be able to lay flat so that's how you have to think
think like someone who is sewing fabric together and think in the sense of
fabric patterns and how they go together so when you're doing a chair think of it
how the fabric pattern was made and where the seams would go in order to
make it all flow smoothly and to look nice that's the same way you should be
unwrapping it when you're doing it in 3d studio max so put your seams there and
use that quick cool that quick peel tool which is super handy and it will work
wonders for you that's really all you need to know think about where your
seams should go and then use that quick peel tool you should be good to go