Using Unwrap UVW, Part 1

Managing Texture Coordinates

Using the Relax Tool on Texture Coordinates

 

Autodesk 3ds Max Tutorials > Materials and Mapping Tutorials > Managing Texture Coordinates > 

Using Unwrap UVW, Part 2

In this lesson, you'll examine Unwrap UVW's Flatten Mapping command for automatic mapping.

Use Flatten Mapping:

1. Click an empty area of the editor window to deselect any selected UVW clusters.
2. In the Edit UVWs dialog, open the Mapping menu and choose Flatten Mapping.

   

   The Flatten Mapping dialog opens.

3. Click OK to accept the default settings and remap the Fuselage using this automatic mapping function.

   

   The software applies planar mapping to each section of the mesh based on the Flatten Mapping dialog settings. The editor now displays a very different set of UVW clusters. Each cluster consists of a set of contiguous faces in which the angle between neighboring faces is less than or equal to the Face Angle Threshold setting in the Flatten Mapping dialog.

   The main difference is that there are many more clusters, and most of them are smaller than in the final. The wings are relatively flat, so their clusters are easy to identify, but most of the rest are not. You can remedy this somewhat by increasing the angle threshold.

   Of course, the underlying texture map remains the same when you change the mapping. If you look at the Perspective viewport, you can see that the mapping is now much different than before.

   

4. Again choose Mapping menu > Flatten mapping, and for Face Angle Threshold, type 61 (this is the angle used by the artist as a first step in creating the final mapping). Click OK to perform the remapping.

   

   The result is fewer clusters than before, but still many more than in the final. In the next procedure, you'll look at a couple of ways of combining these clusters.

Combine the UVW clusters:

You can use the editor's Stitch function to combine clusters one at a time, and the modifier's Planar Map command lets you combine several clusters simultaneously.

1. In the viewport, select the nose-cone element.

   

   This causes all of the UVW clusters used by the nose-cone geometry to highlight in the editor.

2. On the editor's lower toolbar, click the Filter Selected Faces button to turn it on.

   

   Now only the highlighted clusters appear.

3. Click outside the bounding box to deselect everything, then click a vertex on one of the smaller clusters to select the cluster.

   

   Highlighted edges and vertices appear on one or more other clusters to show the sub-objects shared with the selected cluster.

4. In the Tools menu, choose Stitch Selected.

   

   The Stitch Tool dialog appears, and one of the other clusters moves next to the selected clusters, with the shared sub-objects “stitched” together. The software automatically stitches the cluster with the most shared sub-objects; if two or more share the same number of sub-objects, it picks the one with the lowest vertex ID numbers. In this case, it picked the rightmost cluster near the top of the editor window.

5. In the dialog, click the Align Clusters check box to turn it off, note what happens, then click it again to turn it back on.

   When you turn off Align Clusters, the attached cluster moves back to its original position. Use this when the automatic alignment positions the attached cluster in an undesirable way, such as overlapping the first cluster.

6. Click OK to close the dialog.

   Next, you'll use Planar Map to combine all of the nose cone clusters at once.

7. In the viewport, select the nose cone element.
8. On the Modify panel > Map Parameters rollout, click Planar.

   

   The Planar button turns yellow and the clusters combine into a single cluster that's roughly the shape of the nose-cone texture in the upper-right section of the bitmap. But the cluster is oriented differently than the texture, and is much bigger.

9. On the Map Parameters rollout, click Align X. This will reorient the mapping gizmo so that it is perpendicular to the nose cone element.

   

10. Near the bottom-right corner of the Edit UVWs dialog, click the Rot. -90 button to match the orientation.
11. In the Modify panel > Map Parameters rollout, click Planar again to exit Planar Mapping mode.
12. Use the Freeform Mode transform tools to fit the cluster to the nose-cone texture. Drag the corners of the bounding box to scale the cluster, and drag within the bounding box to move it. Check your work in the viewport, and render if you like.

    

    To get an exact match, you'd have to move the vertices as well.