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Integrated BIM tools, including Revit, AutoCAD, and Civil 3D
& Manufacturing
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Professional CAD/CAM tools built on Inventor and AutoCAD
Integrated BIM tools, including Revit, AutoCAD, and Civil 3D
Professional CAD/CAM tools built on Inventor and AutoCAD
Create UVs for your 3D assets so that 2D textures can be applied to them, starting with creating simple UV projections.
Type:
Tutorial
Length:
7 min.
Tutorial resources
These downloadable resources will be used to complete this tutorial:
Transcript
00:04
Well,
00:04
now that we've taken a look at how we can
00:05
add materials and some procedural textures in three Ds Macs.
00:09
Let's look at how we can create and manipulate U V S U
00:13
V s will control how those maps are wrapped around our 3D geometry.
00:16
And right now you can see there's just a
00:18
simple cylinder that we're gonna be working with,
00:20
but there is some other geometry if you want to follow along.
00:23
So we can think of U V S as telling three Ds Macs how we want a flat image.
00:28
So think about all of our texture maps and our procedurals.
00:31
Those are gonna be flat square images. How do we want those to wrap around a 3D models?
00:36
So we can think of our 3D models as kind of like a cardboard box.
00:39
We need to cut them apart in strategic locations
00:42
and flatten them down into a two D space so that we can then apply
00:45
the texture to those polygons and they can get wrapped around our 3D model.
00:49
So we'll take a look at actually working with the U V S themselves.
00:52
But the first thing I want to do is take a look at how
00:55
the U V S affect the way the textures look on the model.
00:58
That's gonna give us a great clue on how we need to modify our U V S.
01:01
So to do that, I'm gonna come up here and where it says user to find,
01:04
I'm gonna change the shading and I'm gonna come under materials
01:07
and I'm gonna turn this override with U V checker.
01:10
What that's gonna do is override any of our display settings and
01:12
it's gonna show a U V checker texture on our model.
01:16
So here you can see we have some squares with numbers in them and
01:20
then on the top we have some color and we'll make sense of this.
01:22
And so
01:23
knowing what this is supposed to look like is really important.
01:26
So this U V checker is basically a bunch of squares with numbers in them.
01:31
And you can tell if your U V s are correct based on if
01:34
the squares are square shaped and if the numbers are distorted and so forth.
01:37
So let's take a look at just by default, uh what this looks like.
01:41
So we can actually read the numbers on the side. That's good.
01:44
The problem is
01:46
we know that these are supposed to be square and they're actually squashed.
01:49
And so we can see there is some distortion, you can also see in the text,
01:53
it's distorted a little bit too.
01:54
Everything is kind of squashed.
01:56
So that's one issue, if we look on the caps,
01:58
you can see, we don't have any sort of a square shape at all.
02:02
It's just sort of these streaks coming around.
02:04
So we know that there's something wrong there.
02:06
So that lets us know kind of if we have our U V S correct
02:09
or not because when we go in and then attach our actual texture to this,
02:14
they will be distorted in the same way.
02:16
So the goal of creating U V s is to make all of this laid
02:19
out in squares nice and undistorted so that our final texture will look correct.
02:24
So there are several ways that we can go about projecting U V S.
02:27
One of the ways that we can do this is just to go into our
02:30
modifier list and we'll add a modifier to the stack
02:34
and let's just scroll down. And there are a bunch here listed near uh unwrap U V.
02:38
We'll use that in a second, but let's just start with U V W map.
02:41
So we'll go ahead and add that
02:43
U V map.
02:44
Now, you can see just by adding it to the stack,
02:47
our U V S change.
02:48
So now
02:49
the caps look correct, you can see see the squares are actually square shaped,
02:54
there's no distortion at all.
02:56
So the caps look great.
02:57
We look at the cap on the bottom, it looks great as well,
02:60
the sides not so much.
03:01
And so what's happening is, if we look at our U V map modifier,
03:04
we can see that right now it's set to planer.
03:06
So what it's doing is projecting a U V S from a single plane in this case,
03:10
from this direction,
03:12
that's why these look correct.
03:13
But as you come down the side, this is completely stretched out.
03:17
We can change our mapping from planar to let's say cylindrical.
03:20
This is a cylinder after all.
03:22
So if we click on cylindrical, you can see now we get our
03:26
U V S back on the sides. But the top again doesn't look very good
03:29
if we check the cap option next to cylindrical though, that will fix that up.
03:33
And so now we get the sides like we had before
03:37
and the top just like we were using a planar map.
03:40
Now, within this U V map, we can also change the length, width and height.
03:45
So in this case, if we've got squares that are a little bit too squashed,
03:48
what we can do is go to the height
03:51
and you can see
03:52
as we reduce that height, squashes them even more. So what we wanna do
03:55
is increase that height
03:57
until they're nice and square.
03:59
Now, one other issue that we can see is even though these are undistorted,
04:03
we can see that the size of the squares on the top
04:05
does not match the size of the squares on the side.
04:08
So that if we were to add, let's say a stone texture or something like this.
04:11
It's not gonna look the same because you're gonna get a
04:13
lot more pixels up here than you are down here.
04:17
And so the scale of our detail is not gonna be the same.
04:20
Let's now take a look at our actual U V S so
04:22
we can do that by adding another modifier to the stack.
04:25
Let's add our unwrap U V W
04:29
and we'll add that right above our U V map.
04:32
So let's scroll down
04:33
and right under here where it says edit U V S.
04:36
I'm gonna go ahead and choose open U V editor.
04:39
And so here is a view of the actual polygons
04:43
as they're smashed down into our two D space.
04:45
I'll go ahead and turn off the checkerboard here by clicking this button.
04:48
And now you can see what's happening here. So think of this square as our texture.
04:53
And then these are the different polygons within our model.
04:56
If we roll down the unwrap U V W, you can see we can actually select
04:60
individual sub objects within this unwrap.
05:03
And so for instance, I could double click and you can see how that selects the top.
05:07
So now we can actually manipulate these U V S.
05:10
And so using our transform tools. So for instance, let's go to scale,
05:14
I'm just gonna scale
05:16
this cap down.
05:17
And you can see as we scale it down the squares get bigger,
05:21
we'll go ahead and go to move
05:23
and I'll move this off temporarily.
05:25
Let's go ahead and grab the bottom ones
05:27
and we'll do the same thing.
05:28
So I'm just going to our different transform tools.
05:31
We'll scale this down and I'll just kind of eyeball it
05:34
and move it off.
05:36
We can grab this one and we want to have our U V shells stay inside of this square
05:41
and so we can move it
05:44
a little bit,
05:45
we can scale it.
05:46
And the end result, we don't want to have any overlap.
05:49
So we don't want to have these overlapping uh here.
05:52
And we want the scale to be pretty similar.
05:55
What we can do now is go ahead
05:57
and take these and we'll just organize them here in our view.
06:01
And now we've created a U V layout for which we can now create a texture.
06:05
So you can see this is the sides.
06:07
These are the two caps
06:09
and we've done this using the modifier stack without
06:11
even converting our cylinder into an editable polly.
06:15
You don't have to create the U V s and then bake it down.
06:17
You could create everything in a stack.
06:19
You can see we've done a little bit of projection here with our U V
06:22
W map and then we've gone to unwrap to actually modify those U V s.
06:26
Now, once you're done, if you like the way the U V s are, you can go ahead, right.
06:30
Click on this and we'll just collapse this all, we'll say yes.
06:34
And now we've got an edible mash.
06:36
If we want to make that edible poly, we can just convert it
06:39
and we don't have any modifiers on the stack anymore.
06:41
But you can see our U V S are going to remain,
06:43
that's gonna stay with the geometry regardless whether you have that modifier on
06:47
assuming that you've baked everything down.
Video transcript
00:04
Well,
00:04
now that we've taken a look at how we can
00:05
add materials and some procedural textures in three Ds Macs.
00:09
Let's look at how we can create and manipulate U V S U
00:13
V s will control how those maps are wrapped around our 3D geometry.
00:16
And right now you can see there's just a
00:18
simple cylinder that we're gonna be working with,
00:20
but there is some other geometry if you want to follow along.
00:23
So we can think of U V S as telling three Ds Macs how we want a flat image.
00:28
So think about all of our texture maps and our procedurals.
00:31
Those are gonna be flat square images. How do we want those to wrap around a 3D models?
00:36
So we can think of our 3D models as kind of like a cardboard box.
00:39
We need to cut them apart in strategic locations
00:42
and flatten them down into a two D space so that we can then apply
00:45
the texture to those polygons and they can get wrapped around our 3D model.
00:49
So we'll take a look at actually working with the U V S themselves.
00:52
But the first thing I want to do is take a look at how
00:55
the U V S affect the way the textures look on the model.
00:58
That's gonna give us a great clue on how we need to modify our U V S.
01:01
So to do that, I'm gonna come up here and where it says user to find,
01:04
I'm gonna change the shading and I'm gonna come under materials
01:07
and I'm gonna turn this override with U V checker.
01:10
What that's gonna do is override any of our display settings and
01:12
it's gonna show a U V checker texture on our model.
01:16
So here you can see we have some squares with numbers in them and
01:20
then on the top we have some color and we'll make sense of this.
01:22
And so
01:23
knowing what this is supposed to look like is really important.
01:26
So this U V checker is basically a bunch of squares with numbers in them.
01:31
And you can tell if your U V s are correct based on if
01:34
the squares are square shaped and if the numbers are distorted and so forth.
01:37
So let's take a look at just by default, uh what this looks like.
01:41
So we can actually read the numbers on the side. That's good.
01:44
The problem is
01:46
we know that these are supposed to be square and they're actually squashed.
01:49
And so we can see there is some distortion, you can also see in the text,
01:53
it's distorted a little bit too.
01:54
Everything is kind of squashed.
01:56
So that's one issue, if we look on the caps,
01:58
you can see, we don't have any sort of a square shape at all.
02:02
It's just sort of these streaks coming around.
02:04
So we know that there's something wrong there.
02:06
So that lets us know kind of if we have our U V S correct
02:09
or not because when we go in and then attach our actual texture to this,
02:14
they will be distorted in the same way.
02:16
So the goal of creating U V s is to make all of this laid
02:19
out in squares nice and undistorted so that our final texture will look correct.
02:24
So there are several ways that we can go about projecting U V S.
02:27
One of the ways that we can do this is just to go into our
02:30
modifier list and we'll add a modifier to the stack
02:34
and let's just scroll down. And there are a bunch here listed near uh unwrap U V.
02:38
We'll use that in a second, but let's just start with U V W map.
02:41
So we'll go ahead and add that
02:43
U V map.
02:44
Now, you can see just by adding it to the stack,
02:47
our U V S change.
02:48
So now
02:49
the caps look correct, you can see see the squares are actually square shaped,
02:54
there's no distortion at all.
02:56
So the caps look great.
02:57
We look at the cap on the bottom, it looks great as well,
02:60
the sides not so much.
03:01
And so what's happening is, if we look at our U V map modifier,
03:04
we can see that right now it's set to planer.
03:06
So what it's doing is projecting a U V S from a single plane in this case,
03:10
from this direction,
03:12
that's why these look correct.
03:13
But as you come down the side, this is completely stretched out.
03:17
We can change our mapping from planar to let's say cylindrical.
03:20
This is a cylinder after all.
03:22
So if we click on cylindrical, you can see now we get our
03:26
U V S back on the sides. But the top again doesn't look very good
03:29
if we check the cap option next to cylindrical though, that will fix that up.
03:33
And so now we get the sides like we had before
03:37
and the top just like we were using a planar map.
03:40
Now, within this U V map, we can also change the length, width and height.
03:45
So in this case, if we've got squares that are a little bit too squashed,
03:48
what we can do is go to the height
03:51
and you can see
03:52
as we reduce that height, squashes them even more. So what we wanna do
03:55
is increase that height
03:57
until they're nice and square.
03:59
Now, one other issue that we can see is even though these are undistorted,
04:03
we can see that the size of the squares on the top
04:05
does not match the size of the squares on the side.
04:08
So that if we were to add, let's say a stone texture or something like this.
04:11
It's not gonna look the same because you're gonna get a
04:13
lot more pixels up here than you are down here.
04:17
And so the scale of our detail is not gonna be the same.
04:20
Let's now take a look at our actual U V S so
04:22
we can do that by adding another modifier to the stack.
04:25
Let's add our unwrap U V W
04:29
and we'll add that right above our U V map.
04:32
So let's scroll down
04:33
and right under here where it says edit U V S.
04:36
I'm gonna go ahead and choose open U V editor.
04:39
And so here is a view of the actual polygons
04:43
as they're smashed down into our two D space.
04:45
I'll go ahead and turn off the checkerboard here by clicking this button.
04:48
And now you can see what's happening here. So think of this square as our texture.
04:53
And then these are the different polygons within our model.
04:56
If we roll down the unwrap U V W, you can see we can actually select
04:60
individual sub objects within this unwrap.
05:03
And so for instance, I could double click and you can see how that selects the top.
05:07
So now we can actually manipulate these U V S.
05:10
And so using our transform tools. So for instance, let's go to scale,
05:14
I'm just gonna scale
05:16
this cap down.
05:17
And you can see as we scale it down the squares get bigger,
05:21
we'll go ahead and go to move
05:23
and I'll move this off temporarily.
05:25
Let's go ahead and grab the bottom ones
05:27
and we'll do the same thing.
05:28
So I'm just going to our different transform tools.
05:31
We'll scale this down and I'll just kind of eyeball it
05:34
and move it off.
05:36
We can grab this one and we want to have our U V shells stay inside of this square
05:41
and so we can move it
05:44
a little bit,
05:45
we can scale it.
05:46
And the end result, we don't want to have any overlap.
05:49
So we don't want to have these overlapping uh here.
05:52
And we want the scale to be pretty similar.
05:55
What we can do now is go ahead
05:57
and take these and we'll just organize them here in our view.
06:01
And now we've created a U V layout for which we can now create a texture.
06:05
So you can see this is the sides.
06:07
These are the two caps
06:09
and we've done this using the modifier stack without
06:11
even converting our cylinder into an editable polly.
06:15
You don't have to create the U V s and then bake it down.
06:17
You could create everything in a stack.
06:19
You can see we've done a little bit of projection here with our U V
06:22
W map and then we've gone to unwrap to actually modify those U V s.
06:26
Now, once you're done, if you like the way the U V s are, you can go ahead, right.
06:30
Click on this and we'll just collapse this all, we'll say yes.
06:34
And now we've got an edible mash.
06:36
If we want to make that edible poly, we can just convert it
06:39
and we don't have any modifiers on the stack anymore.
06:41
But you can see our U V S are going to remain,
06:43
that's gonna stay with the geometry regardless whether you have that modifier on
06:47
assuming that you've baked everything down.
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