Yeh, you've pretty much got the basic idea correctish. I'm probably not the best guy to be talking about this as I haven't had a lot of experince with it, but basically you have to apply a uvw unwrap modifier to you model and edit it so you end up with a 2d image of your flattened model. Then you can use this image as a template for drawing on diffuse, specular bump etc textures in photoshop.

This tute gives a pretty good overview:

[Link to au.youtube.com]

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

Oh wow a tutorial with voices even. Thank the lord cause the other you tube links people gave me are too smalla nd blurry to see what buttons they are pushing on visual alone. I'll see where I get with this thanks.

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Good luck. Unwrapping is quite difficult but very rewarding.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

If you haven't figured it out by now, you should think of uvw unwrapping like drawing out your model in photoshop. How ever you lay that mesh out, will be what you paint. If you have two faces over lapping, they will have the exact same texture on that 2000x2000 image.

A trick I use is, while in UVW Unwrap, I'll grab a bunch of faces I want to paint as a group. While selected I'll click then the "plane" button on AND off. Then once in the uvw editor, I'll see my flattened, and in almost perfect, mesh. I'll set it aside and leave it alone then divide the other big parts in the same way using the plane button. Once I have a good collection of "easy to understand" mesh, I'll start welding and adjusting parts.

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I would do a quick video, but it would be to small and would not have "voices" So it wouldn't be much help.

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Chris

I know the concept of UVW unwrap and thats whY I want to do it. Not looking for the little tricks so much as the nuts and bolts. I dont expect to learn how to do photoshop here, but the rest part (the exact buttons u push, step by step) on the other pats would be great.

If your video zooms in far enough to read the buttons that is fine. Even just a typed quicky on which ways to do it in here would be great. Anything that I can read works for me.

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oh btw, how are all of you doing advanced models without unwrap? Ive been told from the modding game community I frequent that its the only way to do detailed and custom objects. Although maybe its just cause for the sake of modding you want to have only 1 graphic file with each 3ds file. But if not what do you all do to texture? Its been my understandign that box, cylinder, face etc (the built in uv maps) are for simple shapes only...?

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The other method would be to select the mesh and apply the material to that selection.

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If you are having trouble deciding where to "chop up" the model, at least if it is a character, my advice is to look at clothing because that is essentially what clothes do- they start from a flat piece of material and are sewn together into a 3D shape.

So look to the seams in your clothing to start getting ideas about where the seams should be in your model. Funny thing, laying out pieces of a character looks suspitiously like the patterns laid out on fabric- especially the part about using the least amount of fabric/space as possible!

Sue

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I think everyone is assuming too much of my knowledge. I dont know how to do this at all, its not about "Deciding" where to chop up or how to place things, I dont know how to chop them at all. But after watching this video, I got my model open in EDIT UVWs window.

Now, I see a bunch of faces I want to make as one "slice" for the sake of later painting/texturing. So how can I make the UVWs window join them together ? Basically I got a long railing that seems to be split at every horizontal line, and Id like it to be all one, ofcourse.



Thanks for the help so far.

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Thats good advice from Sue to think of it like clothing seams. If you are confused by the unwrap editor when it shows you a mess of all your polygons overlapping. one good way to start is to select all the faces in the unwrap editor and go to mapping>flatten mapping. that will automatically break it all up into chunks based on a threshold.
the threshold will group polygons based on their relative angles. so all the sides of a box will be seperate at 90 degrees for example. If you do this to a character you can often begin re-arranging the pieces and stitching together the bits to make larger chunks and less seems. Ideally you would do this manually using a tool like pelt mapping where you draw your own seams carefully then break the mesh up piece by piece and run a tool that stretches and relaxes the pieces out automatically so there are no overlapping faces.

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Oh really, I saw a pelt tutorial but it seemed a little out of my grasp. So there is no way to just select all those little faces and click join somehow? I got everything flattened and it largely looks good theres just the railings that really need to be come one but are instead about 20:

[Link to img218.imageshack.us]

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Well, you could apply the same sort of method onto subobject selections. having done a large amount of the unwrap automatically with flatten mapping select the polygons in the viewport for the area you want to map and hit one of the mapping types buttons in uvw unwrap. or do another flatten on the subobject selection with a higher threshold. when you hit a mapping button your selection will syddenly grow to fill the texture area so scale and rotate it down to fit somewhere in the texture based on how much resolution it will need in your painted texture.
Eventually you will need to do some manual work moving the stranglers to where they should be and welding them together. when you select a vertex in the editor its partner will highlight in blue showing you where you need to weld it. when its in place you can target weld the two together and stitch up the seem that way. Pelt is really a very good tool that makes this whole process take far less time and its not really any harder than anything else you might be trying to do in the unwrap window. just draw your pelt seems onto the character mesh. pick a polygon and grow the selection out to the pelt seem. then use pelt mapping and stretch it out. repeat until all your bits are mapped then arrange the pieces in the texture area.

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Ok even though I totally dont know what I am doing, I experimented given certain keywords in your reply.

What I do is cluv the Unwrap UVW stack, then click faces and select a broken up group that I think should be one. Once ive selected them all, I clicked pelt. Just left it as is and then clicked PLANAR. And then the map seams changed to a more pleasing pattern, with the sides of the boat hull looking like 1 nice continous map, circled by green lines on the edges (Map seams). I have also come to determine by altering the angle I can make the flatten mapping feature in the edit window, auotmatically choose bigger seams. But they are entirely wrong here so it isn an option to do it automatically.

Now here is where I am at a wall again: Once I view them in the edit window they are all on top of each other again. I can click flatten mapping to get them arranged nice, but then it overrites my manually (and more correct) pelting or whatever it is I did, with bad (too many) different pieces.

Is there a way to automatically spread out the pieces without altering my manual mapping/pelting work in the edit window? Cause they are no good while on top of each other even tho they are better and fewer pieces now.

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You can use the pack uvs command. Its in one of the menus there, cant think off the top of my head.
just select all your pieces at once and hit pack uvs and it will rescale everything and fit them in the space. but doing that can mean you forget which bit was what and its not always efficient in the sense that it doesnt always make the best use of the space. Normally I would pick the pieces by element and use the scale and rotate tools to arrange them in the uv space. or if you are confident that you will know what piece is which after a pack uvs operation you could arrange them a bit manually afterward making the more important areas of the mesh use more of the texture space, for example the face should use more space than the inside of the mouth or the soles of the feet.

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Ok its looking pretty good. One more issue I am having, is I will use my select faces, pelt, planar method (then I click align z,x,y as appropriate), but the green mesh edges will not dissapear on certain spots. Is this completely impossible or is there some way I can make it do exactly what I want when it comes to the seams?

As for your mention of the faces in the UVP map, I did not realize I could just pull them around at will (I do see that the texture moves in the vieport when I do though) so yes thats probably a better idea. Resizing them would be to add detail I see, but does it not also alter the texture tiling size (that is, if you shrink it, the pattern might repeat less often on the finished product)? If so, I would like to know the method that will keep the exact scale in the model, on the UVW maps. I am using some wood planks so it would totally blow it if the scale changed in the UVW unwrap editor. So far, some of them seem to have changed size on their own. Definitely not to scale.

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OK well, I think the pelt part of your process isnt really needed, its sort of either pelt or planar.
just select faces and hit the planar button then align to the averaged normals or by hand.
really the purpose of unwrapping is to use the texture space as you see it in the editor. you can arrange all your wood and details on the same texture page in photoshop but if you are just using a tiled map like concrete or wood then all your various shapes are going to get treated differently based on their scale and orientation in the editor. Its often much better to map it with one of the uvw map options like box mapping. or very carefully make sure that all the pieces of mesh in the unwrap editor are arranged so they work correctly. sometimes you will need to straighten up rows of edges so a straight piece of wood texture will curve around a model. when it comes to seams, you can't avoid them you have to have them somewhere but you can try and minimise them by stitching the pieces of mesh together using target weld. and it is important to try and hide the seams where possible like up the inside of a characters leg or up the back of his head etc... you can minimise the look of seems by making sure you paint the exact same colour along the edges of each piece of mesh in the editor.
for example you could map both sides of a hand with planar mapping and paint all the details of the skin on each piece and blend all the edges out to a solid pink colour so that where the seams meet you just get pink meeting pink and the seam is hidden.

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ok thanks. So there is no way to force the unwrap outlines to stay to their scale of the model? For some reason, the bottom flat part of my boat is big, but the top side is a tiny little piece. Surely there is some way to make it not interpret, and just unwrap with no frills and no changes..??

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In terms of automatic no work required tools flatten mapping is probably as close as you will get.
If for instance you wanted to quickly map a tilable cement texture all over a building doing a quick flatten mapping operation and tiling the map in the material editor until it looks at the right scale is a nice way to quickly avoid dealing with all the polygons by hand. but I don't think there is a tool that will intelligently scale all your unwrapped pieces. Its like any other part of the process there is a certain amount of tedious work involved. in fact texturing and particularly unwrapping is known for this in particular. There are loads of tools to speed up your workflow though and you just need to learn when and where to apply a simple method and when to go hardcore into unwrapping the whole mesh with perfect seems etc..
personally I use uvw maps and quite often procedural maps (that don't require mapping coordinates) as often as possible and only really resort to unwrapping things when I need very specific mapping.

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Alright well I would it by hand if it some how had an indicator of the % scale of each piece, but its all guessing. But I can see how that could be acceptable if I do my pieces right just seems a little undwieldly and I dont see why it cant keep the scale. Thanks!

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If you display the texture you are using behind the unwrapped uvs (top right corner drop down) you can see pretty clearly what part is getting what part of the texture map. Are you saying that when you use the pack uvs function it messes up the scale? I might be mis understanding you.
If so theres a few options in the pack uvs tool (like normalise, recursive or linear packing etc, you might have to check out the help to know exactly what they all mean) but your best bet is just to move and scale them to fit in by hand I guess.

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No pack UVs does it well. If I am not mistaken once I flatten everything it is to scale. But that is never the correct seams for me, so I have to do some by hand and those are the ones that lose the scale. I am doing my best to get as accurate an auto mapping i can. This time I might be able to skate by but I could see this being a future problem

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