Tutorial 9 - UV Coordinates

This process is quite lengthy and will be handled in two parts.
Only want to set up the mapping coordinates for one side of the model and editable poly is the current modifier. Make sure that you are not in sub object mode.
Click on Unwrap UVW modifier, which should be placed above the editable poly modifier and under the symmetry modifier in the stack.
We are going to use cylindrical projection mapping for the majority of the head and pelt mapping for the ear as it is a complex shape.

Click on unwrap and go into face sub object mode, go to the left view port and turn off ignore back facing. Change our marquee mode to paint, hold down control on the keyboard and just go over and paint our selection. We want to avoid the ear as we will be handling this separately.
Now the face is painted go to map parameters. Five options, planar, cylindrical spherical and box, similar to the UVW modifier. Use cylindrical method as we want the texture to flow nicely around the head. It is currently following the wrong direction so we use the align buttons to choose the correct orientation. In the top view port our mesh is not entirely within the cylindrical gizmo. So scale our cylindrical gizmo up and centre it. If it is not centred you will get all these additional green lines which are seams which are discontinuities in the UV layout. What you want is one seam going down the middle. Come out of cylindrical mode, and before we do some fine modifications to the texture coordinates we want to see the effect we are having on it. So apply a checker pattern on the object. If you press M to bring up the material editor and apply. We can see many stretched out areas here and ideally each of these chequers should be square, and that’s far from the case. Now we have this set up under parameters on the right hand side, press edit., this brings up our Edit UVs dialogue box. We only want to only focus on the face here not the ear. We can tell max to hide everything except all the faces we have identified with the filter selected faces button. Press on that and the ear will disappear. Under options, there are a couple of things we want to change here. Make sure that tile bitmap is off. Make sure that constant update is on, and what this is, is when we start pulling points around it will update in the view port in real time. Deselect everything.
One of the first things you want to do is make sure that the texture co ordinates came in correctly. Select > select inverted faces. Inverted faces are pretty nasty especially if you want to go over to another package such as ZBrush you use it for creating displacement maps or normal maps. You can see that the majority of our faces are inverted. Click and drag on all the faces, click on the mirror tool and position this in out little square here. You can also resize this with the little apparatus surrounding out selection. If you click and drag on one of the corners you can resize it, on the sides you can rotate and in the middle you can move. Now this apparatus is achieved through the freeform mode, we can also move rotate and scale the selection.
Look at one troubled area the top of the head, if we look at our UV coordinates, you can see that this one face going along the top of the head here is stretched significantly which is using a lot of pixels whereas others are not using up much at all. To fix this use the relax tool in 3D S Max. Select the various vertices that we need go up to tools > relax dialogue make sure that it is relax by edge angles and then click apply. You notice that it rounded out the top of the head making the top in our view port clearer and much more uniform. We basically want to do this for the rest of the head, going into troubled areas and you can run the relax several times to get the effect we want. When setting up your UV’s make sure that you don’t have any ambiguous quads. Here you notice that if I don’t move this point it looks like a triangle which will lead to problems;
Lets look at another troubled area, the eye, if we zoom in really close to the eye you will see that we have a lot of overlapping parts. These need to be flattened out so there ar no overlapping parts. So switchover to vertex mode go to paint select mode and press the plus sign several time to increase out brush size click and drag over the vertices that we want to work with, here the ones directly surrounding the eye. Click on Relax by edge angles, which doesn’t seem to fixing it its just collapsing on them, so now click on Relax by centres - now much cleaner. Zoom in and switch to the paint tool again, select the various points of the first two rows, scale – scale them in, can switch over to edges, select one of the edges in the second row, you can use ring edges or loop to speed up the selection. You now have a cleaner eye socket. You need to do this for the rest of the head. You now have all the UV’s sorted out for the rest of the face. You want to make sure that you have no inverted or overlapped faces that make for a very clean UV layout. If we choose overlapped faces, and we have one at the corner of the mouth, go to edit vertex mode and move it out of the way. Go to face mode and select overlapping faces and we no longer have any. Make sure that you run these periodically to make sure everything is fine and a nice clean UV layout. So now the head is fairly uniform and a good end result.