WEBVTT 00:06.000 --> 00:12.080 So, UVs are basically all the faces of the mesh laid out flat, and that way we can use 00:12.080 --> 00:16.560 a texture to colour our mesh, and wherever the faces are that we've laid out flat, we'll 00:16.560 --> 00:18.480 use that bit of the texture. 00:18.480 --> 00:22.520 This will hopefully become clear as we work through creating the UVs and texturing the 00:22.520 --> 00:23.780 mesh. 00:23.780 --> 00:27.880 And before diving into unwrapping our mesh, I'd just like to go through some fundamentals 00:27.880 --> 00:30.200 of working with UVs in Blender. 00:30.200 --> 00:35.920 So let's just create a basic cylinder to experiment on, and I'm going to use the third layer now. 00:35.920 --> 00:39.160 I'm going to just click on the third layer at the bottom, just because it's a nice clean 00:39.160 --> 00:44.480 scene, and then I'm going to go Shift S, and then cursor to the centre, just to reset the 00:44.480 --> 00:45.920 position there. 00:45.920 --> 00:50.880 And then I'm going to go Shift A and add in a mesh cylinder, and that should be fine. 00:50.880 --> 00:53.480 And this, let's just call this UV tests. 00:54.480 --> 00:59.800 Okay, so I'm going to close out the tool shelves there with the T key and the N key, just to 00:59.800 --> 01:01.560 give us a little bit more space. 01:01.560 --> 01:06.180 And then I'm going to tab into edit mode, and then I'll just add an extra edge loop 01:06.180 --> 01:08.800 just towards the bottom there with Ctrl R. 01:08.800 --> 01:14.120 We don't need our reference image in the background here, so I'm just going to press X just to 01:14.120 --> 01:16.000 remove that. 01:16.000 --> 01:20.560 And all of our UVs will show up in here, and in fact, if I select everything with the A 01:20.560 --> 01:25.800 key, you can see none of the standard objects come with UVs, so we're going to actually 01:25.800 --> 01:28.920 need to build all of our UVs from scratch. 01:28.920 --> 01:33.040 It's not too tricky to do, all we need to do is just press the U key, and then that 01:33.040 --> 01:37.880 will bring up our UV mapping menu, and then at the top here we can see we've got unwrap, 01:37.880 --> 01:39.840 so let's just give that a try. 01:39.840 --> 01:44.120 And it kind of looks like Blender has completely ignored us, but if we just press T to bring 01:44.120 --> 01:48.520 up our tool shelf, you can see that we've got at the bottom here this unwrap. 01:48.520 --> 01:53.280 In fact, we can also do that with F6, and you can see that we've definitely performed 01:53.280 --> 01:56.120 some kind of unwrap method. 01:56.120 --> 02:01.160 So not a lot has happened, and the reason for this is because Blender requires some 02:01.160 --> 02:04.220 seams because otherwise it doesn't know exactly what you mean. 02:04.220 --> 02:10.180 So if we actually just come into edge select mode with Ctrl Tab, and then Alt Right-click 02:10.180 --> 02:14.920 on this edge here, we can say Ctrl E and then Mark a seam. 02:14.920 --> 02:19.120 Imagine this is using some scissors to try and lay this out as flat. 02:19.120 --> 02:24.040 It can now calculate how it might like to try and lay the whole mesh down flat, knowing 02:24.040 --> 02:26.180 that it can actually cut down this line now. 02:26.180 --> 02:30.560 So if we select everything with the A key again, and then try that again with the U 02:30.560 --> 02:34.760 key, and then unwrap, we get a total mess. 02:34.760 --> 02:41.000 Because although it has some information that it can cut down this line, it's clearly not 02:41.000 --> 02:42.000 enough. 02:42.000 --> 02:43.860 And in fact, it's not too difficult. 02:43.860 --> 02:49.520 We can just select this face at the top, and then go Ctrl E, and then Mark that as a seam. 02:49.520 --> 02:53.900 And now let's give that a try with the A key, and then press U, and then unwrap now. 02:53.900 --> 02:55.980 And now things are starting to look a little bit cleaner. 02:55.980 --> 03:00.160 If we just take a look at the bottom and repeat that kind of procedure, so select the bottom 03:00.160 --> 03:05.120 face, Ctrl E, and then Mark seam, and then try that again with selecting everything with 03:05.120 --> 03:10.320 the A key, and then U, and then unwrap, we can see we now get something looking a lot 03:10.320 --> 03:11.880 more reasonable. 03:11.880 --> 03:16.600 So if we press F6, we can come and take a look at the margin, and we can still tweak 03:16.600 --> 03:21.760 this, if we want to kind of give a little bit more distance between the UV islands there. 03:21.760 --> 03:26.600 So that's the first major thing to think about when unwrapping, is where you want UV seams. 03:26.600 --> 03:29.600 And if that sounds daunting, because you're not sure where you might want your seams at 03:29.600 --> 03:33.520 this stage, there is another way we can begin to lay out our UVs. 03:33.520 --> 03:37.080 And that's by using a smart UV project. 03:37.080 --> 03:42.000 So first of all, we can clear our seams by going Ctrl E, and then clear seams. 03:42.000 --> 03:46.120 And then if we bring up our UV mapping menu again with the U key, we can see we have this 03:46.120 --> 03:47.840 option smart UV project. 03:47.840 --> 03:52.240 And when we initiate that, we've got some options to be able to pad the islands a little 03:52.240 --> 03:55.000 bit, which I always like to give a little bit more padding there. 03:55.000 --> 03:58.680 And then we've got this angle limit, which is what will change the result of this tool 03:58.680 --> 03:59.680 the most. 03:59.680 --> 04:03.200 Basically, this is going to control the amount of UV islands that we get. 04:03.200 --> 04:07.400 A lower figure in here will give us a lot more islands, but less distortion. 04:07.400 --> 04:12.360 And a higher figure will give us fewer UV islands, but more distortion, meaning the 04:12.360 --> 04:16.920 UVs won't quite match up in size with the actual dimensions of those faces in the 3D 04:16.920 --> 04:17.920 view. 04:17.920 --> 04:20.400 So we'll then need to go in and fix that stretching, which we'll see in a moment. 04:20.400 --> 04:25.240 So I'm actually just going to set this down to something like 45, and then click OK. 04:25.240 --> 04:28.640 And then you can see we have these islands that have been grouped for us now. 04:28.640 --> 04:34.240 In fact, let's just do that again by pressing U and then smart UV project, and then taking 04:34.240 --> 04:37.840 that right down to something like 20, just to see the effect of this. 04:37.840 --> 04:41.200 And then you can see we're getting a lot more different islands there. 04:41.200 --> 04:43.080 So let's try that again. 04:43.080 --> 04:48.760 And then, in fact, let's take that up to something like 90, or 89 is the maximum. 04:48.760 --> 04:50.000 And then click that again. 04:50.000 --> 04:54.000 And then you can see we're getting only a three islands here, but a much more distortion 04:54.000 --> 04:55.000 at the edges. 04:55.000 --> 04:56.000 But that's okay. 04:56.000 --> 04:58.680 So what I'm going to do is just try and correct this now. 04:58.680 --> 05:02.800 So what we can do is we can come in to edge select mode with control tab, and then I'm 05:02.800 --> 05:08.040 going to just shift select these two edges and then press V. And then that's going to 05:08.040 --> 05:10.000 initiate a stitching command. 05:10.000 --> 05:13.880 So at the bottom of the image editor, we can see in the header, we've got some helpful 05:13.880 --> 05:15.200 information here. 05:15.200 --> 05:20.240 Now the main thing that I'm going to concentrate on is which island I want to switch. 05:20.240 --> 05:22.480 It's the I key, which is going to allow us to do that. 05:22.480 --> 05:26.400 So if I pressed I, we can invert which island is getting moved basically. 05:26.400 --> 05:31.200 But I'm going to leave that at default and just press enter to confirm. 05:31.200 --> 05:36.240 And then I'm going to just shift select these two here and press V, and then press enter 05:36.240 --> 05:37.240 again. 05:37.240 --> 05:41.200 And then we can see we now have these three major UV islands. 05:41.200 --> 05:46.440 Next I can come down to the UVs menu and then say seams from islands. 05:46.440 --> 05:49.360 And now it's going to create sort of roughly what we had before. 05:49.360 --> 05:54.360 So we have seam going around the top, two edges down the side, and then on the bottom 05:54.360 --> 05:55.520 face as well. 05:55.520 --> 05:59.880 So if we select everything now and press U and then unwrap again, you can basically 05:59.880 --> 06:02.840 get something very similar to what we had before. 06:02.840 --> 06:06.780 The next thing I'd like to talk about is a couple of helpful things we can use to assist 06:06.780 --> 06:10.200 in our UV mapping to reduce things like stretching. 06:10.200 --> 06:14.880 And to do that, one thing that's going to help us is if we create a new image. 06:14.880 --> 06:16.720 And this is our new image dialogue that we get. 06:16.840 --> 06:19.160 For this, I'm just going to call this color grid for now. 06:19.160 --> 06:25.200 I'm going to alter the color to be something like, in fact, let's just set this to be something 06:25.200 --> 06:28.720 like 0.5, just something in the middle. 06:28.720 --> 06:32.640 And for the size, I'm going to set this to 512 by 512. 06:32.640 --> 06:36.000 And then the generated type is blank currently. 06:36.000 --> 06:39.280 And I'm going to set this to be a color grid. 06:39.280 --> 06:41.320 Once I do that, I can click on OK. 06:41.320 --> 06:43.920 And then you can see we get this color grid in the background. 06:43.920 --> 06:49.080 That's not looking particularly helpful over here, though, because we can't see anything. 06:49.080 --> 06:54.680 If we was to go into textured mode with Alt-Z, which is just switching this viewport shading 06:54.680 --> 06:59.080 mode to texture down here, you can see everything goes black because we don't actually have 06:59.080 --> 07:01.480 a lamp in our visible layer right now. 07:01.480 --> 07:05.600 This is why I'd like to show another option that we've got in the property sidebar with 07:05.600 --> 07:07.000 the N key. 07:07.000 --> 07:12.600 And then down in the shading area, we can switch to textured solid mode with the Z key 07:12.600 --> 07:13.600 first. 07:13.600 --> 07:16.640 And then that will give us this extra option here, the textured solid. 07:16.640 --> 07:21.640 When we do that, we can see whatever texture happens to be associated with its UVs in the 07:21.640 --> 07:22.840 viewport. 07:22.840 --> 07:29.080 And that means we can sort of bypass any harsh shadows and general viewport effects that 07:29.080 --> 07:33.600 we might have happening, which is obscuring a good look at our UVs, basically. 07:33.600 --> 07:40.080 So we can see in here that everything is looking fairly undistorted and isn't flipped or anything, 07:40.080 --> 07:44.720 which is the benefit of being able to visualize this color grid on our object. 07:44.720 --> 07:49.240 If we just select everything with the A key, we can see the actual UVs showing up. 07:49.240 --> 07:51.880 And then we can press A to select everything in here. 07:51.880 --> 07:54.640 And then we can sort of scale them up and you can kind of see the effect that that's 07:54.640 --> 07:56.720 having in the viewport. 07:56.720 --> 08:01.200 Something else that we've got is another sidebar in the image editor that can be quite helpful. 08:01.200 --> 08:07.560 If we press N in here, we've got a UVs area and that's going to allow us to visualize 08:07.560 --> 08:08.960 any stretching in here. 08:08.960 --> 08:12.000 So if I just enable that, that's currently set to angle. 08:12.000 --> 08:16.480 So if we were to just grab one of these and start to move out, you can see if that happened 08:16.480 --> 08:21.360 to be our UVs, we would very easily be able to catch there was some sort of error there 08:21.360 --> 08:24.340 based on the color feedback that we're getting. 08:24.340 --> 08:25.840 Blue is perfectly fine. 08:25.840 --> 08:29.880 And the more that that's getting pushed into red, the more that that is going to become 08:29.880 --> 08:30.880 a problem. 08:30.880 --> 08:35.000 We've all got the angle method of visualizing there. 08:35.000 --> 08:37.200 And we've also got the area method. 08:37.200 --> 08:41.280 Now basically all this is referring to is if we grab this face here and start to scale 08:41.280 --> 08:47.020 it down, it's basically telling us that the difference between area between these islands 08:47.020 --> 08:52.180 is an issue based on the actual size of the geometry in the 3D world. 08:52.180 --> 08:57.400 So the more we scale that back up to be an accurate size, the more that it should all 08:57.400 --> 09:00.020 settle back in a calming blue. 09:00.020 --> 09:04.980 So I'm just going to switch off the stretching information for now and let's take a look 09:04.980 --> 09:09.860 at a couple more things to do with UVs before we begin to unwrap our models. 09:09.860 --> 09:14.660 There's two main ways to visualize and work with our UVs in Blender and each behave and 09:14.660 --> 09:16.780 display slightly differently. 09:16.780 --> 09:21.860 And this is the keep UVs and mesh selection in sync option, which is this little button 09:21.860 --> 09:25.460 that you can see down in the header here of the image editor. 09:25.460 --> 09:31.220 So this option is disabled by default, and I encourage you to get used to the differences. 09:31.460 --> 09:35.860 This option is actually very helpful because as the name of it suggests, it allows us to 09:35.860 --> 09:40.820 visualize which faces on the model belong to which faces in the UV map. 09:40.820 --> 09:43.140 And currently we don't have this enabled. 09:43.140 --> 09:50.120 And you can see that while we have this face selected in the UV map, it's not really giving 09:50.120 --> 09:54.180 us any clue as to what face that might be over in the 3D view. 09:54.180 --> 09:59.860 So if we just enable that now, you can see that we've got all of our faces selected as 09:59.860 --> 10:04.660 we needed when we didn't have that option enabled to be able to see our UVs. 10:04.660 --> 10:10.360 And now what we can do is we can switch to face select mode and then say select this 10:10.360 --> 10:11.460 top face. 10:11.460 --> 10:15.620 And now we can see that this is the face that this corresponds to in the UV map. 10:15.620 --> 10:20.060 And similarly, if we're trying to track down something particular on the sides, this face 10:20.060 --> 10:25.620 here turns out that it's this face over here in this UV island. 10:25.620 --> 10:30.740 So let's just give ourselves a tiny bit more space just to expand out the image editor's 10:30.740 --> 10:32.580 header bar here. 10:32.580 --> 10:37.340 And with this option enabled, it might be a little bit more intuitive as to the way that 10:37.340 --> 10:38.860 this is working. 10:38.860 --> 10:42.660 When we disable it, you'll notice that we have actually got this option here, which 10:42.660 --> 10:45.960 is to do with the sticky selection mode. 10:45.960 --> 10:48.500 So now you'll see that we've disabled it. 10:48.500 --> 10:53.540 The only bit of UVs that are showing up happen to be the face that we have selected in the 10:53.540 --> 10:54.540 view. 10:54.540 --> 10:58.580 So this is kind of a way in which we can kind of isolate UVs and just work on particular 10:58.580 --> 10:59.580 areas. 10:59.580 --> 11:03.180 But there's still another way in which we can do that with the mesh selection in sync. 11:03.180 --> 11:09.380 So if we enable that and then press shift H, we can hide everything in our 3D view. 11:09.380 --> 11:14.540 And that's going to correspond to everything in the image editor as well in our UV editor. 11:14.540 --> 11:17.800 And then we can go alt H just to bring everything back. 11:17.800 --> 11:19.980 So let's press A to deselect everything. 11:19.980 --> 11:21.780 And let's take a look at one more thing. 11:21.780 --> 11:26.980 So if I go control tab and switch to vertex select mode and just select that vertex here, 11:26.980 --> 11:29.640 currently our mesh selection is in sync. 11:29.640 --> 11:35.140 And if I try to start moving this particular selected vertex now, you'll notice that the 11:35.140 --> 11:40.000 corresponding vertex up on that top shell is actually moving as well. 11:40.000 --> 11:45.340 So this is an instance where we might actually like to disable the mesh selection being in 11:45.340 --> 11:49.940 sync with what we're looking at there and then come over to here, select everything 11:49.940 --> 11:51.380 with the A key. 11:51.380 --> 11:56.700 And then if we select this vertex here and start to move it around, you can see we can 11:56.700 --> 12:03.300 just isolate essentially that one particular UV, if you like, rather than moving its corresponding 12:03.300 --> 12:04.660 point on that shell. 12:04.660 --> 12:08.220 If we wanted to change that behavior, by the way, we can actually come down to the sticky 12:08.220 --> 12:13.140 selection mode and just swap it from being shared location to shared vertex. 12:13.140 --> 12:17.460 And now when we select that vertex again, you can see that it's kind of behaving like 12:17.460 --> 12:19.900 it did when the UV selection was in sync. 12:19.980 --> 12:24.300 Also, another thing is you'll notice that we have vertices, edges, faces and islands 12:24.300 --> 12:26.820 to be able to select in this mode. 12:26.820 --> 12:32.060 But if we enable our mesh selection to be in sync, you'll notice that we don't actually 12:32.060 --> 12:36.340 have the island selection anymore here, we've just got the vertex edge and face. 12:36.340 --> 12:41.500 So I think that should give us enough information to start unwrapping our model and then we'll 12:41.500 --> 12:44.940 cover some more topics as we go in a more practical setting.