Wednesday, March 21, 2007

The Art of Unwrapping

When it came to texturing I had a few problems – I didn’t know how the unwrap UV thing worked and when it did I had a few faces on my model that had have polys – this was bad as Unreal would have a fit and not except the model. So I had to unwrap the UV change the faces and then redo the UV, this was done about 3 times and was highly annoying and took a considerable amount of my time (grrr).

Once Unwrap UVW has been selected, the Face should be selected and on the Viewport all of the object that’s needs texturing should be selected. BUT BE AWARE!!! Ignore Backfacing should be not be selected.

The object can be selected by dragging the mouse over the whole object or simply pressing Ctrl+A. Notice now that the object(s) have turned red.
Now select Edit on the tab on the right – this will bring up a new screen.

On the new screen is a map of all the objects selected but broken down by max into elements – looks a bit of a mess but selecting Flatten Mapping and entering numbers around Choose an 75 and 0.25 in the boxes will clean up the Map and also spread them out which will make then much easier to texture.

To move an individual element to a certain area the ‘Select Element’ should be selected, that way the whole Element is moved and not just a little bit.

Now once all the elements are where you want them to be we can now texture it! To do this we have to enable us to use it in Photoshop.