With the UV mapping, the second stage of the project begun in earnest. So far, my abilities to UV map in 3DS Max were limited to the UVW Map modifier – where you can set and customise simple mapping presets such as Planar, Box, Spherical etc etc. This was sufficient for almost everything during the summer internship, but I knew wouldn’t cut it here – the form of the building is too complex.
Before UVing, I went through the imported objects and defined exactly which ones needed dedicated mapping – essentially all those on the exterior of the building. I would play it by ear as to whether they needed a full unwrap, or could be done well enough with UVW Map.
This ended up being 47 different objects. Suffice to say the whole process took in the region of 25 – 30 hours. It would’ve been a bit quicker, but I was still learning how to do much of the process as I went.
Anyhow, I’ll be discussing process through captions as ever on some selected assets in these 2 UV mapping posts – I doubt you’d want or need to read about all 47 of them after all!
UV mapping of the AS_ArchDoorway – one of the larger and trickier objects to map, as well as one of the first. I created appropriate seams by selecting edges and using ‘Convert Edge Selection To Seams’ in the Unwrap UVW rollout. These areas were then selected using ‘Expand Polygon selection to seams’, before hitting Break to separate them.
The UV shells were then unwrapped using a combination of Peel and the Relax UV tools – depending on which gave the nicer results. It was very much a trial and error based approach.
I used a checker material to get a good visual indicator for the UVs throughout the mapping process for all objects. The flat planes (like the paving sections visible here) didn’t require unwraps of course – a simple Planar UVW Map was sufficient.
For some objects like this I could have received similar results much quicker with UVW Map, but I wanted to unwrap them manually myself for practice.
Objects like this arched set of window frames were time consuming, but used the same general workflow – using Point-to-Point seams around the outer and inner frames, Breaking these apart to get workable UV islands, then using the Peel and Relax tools to get nice unwraps. Once done, they were Packed into a UV tile.
Another example of a frame model unwrapped. When UVing, I used the amazing Material modifier, and put it below the Unwrap in the stack – using a MultiSub material, this allowed me to quickly change the material on each object to the Checker pattern, and allow me to change them to whatever I wanted them to later on in the project.
That’s it for the UV mapping in this post – join me in the next one for more Mapping Madness! (note: I am never this cheerful about UV mapping in real life)
Stuart McInnes 