UVW Mapping an object in 3ds Max 5 - Tutorial

[Waylon]

Hey, everyone. I recently finished writing a tutorial on UVW Mapping an object in 3D Studio Max 5. Check it out!

http://waylon-art.com/uvw_tutorial/podship_checkers_small.jpg

http://waylon-art.com/uvw_tutorial/uvwtut_01.html

I haven't had many people look at it yet, so if anything is unclear, misspelled, or just plain wrong, please let me know!

Cheers!

[Snowfly]

thanks for the tutorial waylon! nice & insightful..

i prefer tutorials like this over the technical ones that really don't have any heart. yours shows how to tackle a combination of specific mapping problems.. very useful in the long run, something i'm going to check back often. :)


any chance of you posting a single page printable version?

[Waylon]

Hey, glad you like it. Thanks for the feedback.

There's a full version here: http://waylon-art.com/uvw_tutorial/uvwtut_full.html

but it's a little older. (I added a couple extra notes here and there after I broke it up into the different pages.) Nothing significant, though. Hope it helps.

(Oh, and the images aren't full-size. Not much you can do about that, unfortunately...)

[Lono]

WOW! thanks a lot Waylon!! this is exactally the tutorial i need right now! very informative... :)

ive been texturing and skinning for years, but i rarely layed out my own uv's.. a previous art director tried to teach me how to do it in max once, but i never quite aquired a full understanding.

this is great,, and its most generous of you to take the time to do it.

thanks!

:chug:

[GriNGo]

can this tutorial be applied for Max 4?

[Waylon]

Lono: :) I'm glad to hear it was helpful.

Gringoloco: No, unfortunately, most of the features I cover are new in Max 5. (There's a huge improvement over Max 4's uvw-mapping tools.) You may still learn something from the first few sections though. I talk a bit about general UVW mapping principles, independent of specific software.

[GriNGo]

oh, ok :) dont worry, I still have a lot to learn for Max4 before I switch to 5.

[Fisa]

i am currently using max 4 and have heard that 5 UVWMapping is better, like stated in this thread. any brief specifics, i can note to in your tutorial?

[killing.people]

isnt there a place for tutorial on this site, it is the emtpy one right? why not put this in there? can only admins put threads in there?
-kp

[Waylon]

Oh, huh, that forum wasn't there when I posted this. :)
Maybe a mod can move this thread.

Of course, the problem with empty forums (especially ones so far down on the list) is that no one ever looks at them.

Oh, and Fisa... Pretty much everything I covered in my tutorial is new in Max 5. In Max4, the only thing you could do in the Unwrap UVW tool was move vertices around, and even that was a pain. (there was no good method for figuring out exactly what coordinates you had selected, moving groups around, etc.)

The basic workflow in Max4 is <Mesh Select> Select a bunch of faces. <UVW Map> planar map. <Unwrap UVW> Move mapping so that it fits nicely. Repeat until the whole object is mapped.

It was really a pain to map objects that way. :) (Oh, you could always just add a box map, or spherical map, or something like that if you didn't need perfect results... but that doesn't work in most situations.)

[AfroLaxMan]

Waylon-

I read about the PSD file integration, does this material allow for an editable text layer in the PSD file?

[Waylon]

When Max imports a .psd file as a texture, it looks... well, exactly like it looks in Photoshop. So in that sense, yes, it supports editable text layers.

Now, can you actually DO anything with that layer, other than use it as a flat texture? I'm not sure. When you import the psd file, it asks if you'd like to use collapsed layers or individual layers (which lets you pick the layer you want for that material.) I... haven't used the individual layers feature yet, so I can't tell you too much there. I'm sure it's pretty exciting though. :)

[DClaypool]

Max 5 five lets you import psd files! sweet! Do you know if you can import them as different types of textures (ie. use one layer as a bump, one as the diffuse, one as the spec)? That would save a helluva lot of time.

btw thanks for the Tut, I just started working with 5 and so far like the workflow.

[Waylon]

Yeah, looks like you can do that. When you select the PSD as your texture map, you can choose which layer you want for that specific texture. So you can just load the same psd for diffuse, bump, etc, but choose a different layer for each.

One thing I'm not sure about is if it uses the layer's alpha. Haven't tested it, but I bet it does. This is sounding cooler and cooler!

[DClaypool]

thaks again for the info, waylon. when I start texturing a character this weekend that will really help out.:D

[J Bradford]

I've got a question, when you are unwrapping different sections of the model, how do you get each section (ID) to all show up in the same Edit UV window? I was told you have to apply a mesh select to each edit mesh modifier you apply when selecting a new a section of the mesh to unwrap, but I can't seem to get it right.

[Waylon]

That sounds like the old (max4) way of mapping, but... not quite.

Your modifier stack keeps track of which polygons are selected. If the top of your stack is an edit mesh or mesh select modifier, and if you're in sub-object mode (face, polygon, or element) then adding a uvw modifier on top of that will only affect whichever faces you have selected. So in max4 and earlier, the standard procedure was to select a bunch of faces, apply a uvw map modifier, select a bunch more faces, add another uvw map modifier... etc.

In max5, well, you can do a lot more from Unwrap UVW, so there's no need to build a huge modifier stack.

(does that clear it up?)