How to make UV Maps?

Now I am making amazing progress so far, I am learning all of the components of making a game all for myself (modeling, animating, scripting, audio, terrain, etc.) all by myself and am making substantial progress. But something that I have lacked this whole entire time was one thing. That one thing is texturing. There are just some things that I find hard for me to wrap my head around. One thing that I don't understand at all is how to "map", UV Maps. I am using Photoshop right now. I'm talking about stuff like

and



How do you know what goes where. And how do you go about making them? It seems SO CONFUSING to me how you make stuff like that with a 2d texture and picture making program adding the little details and just even making the general basic shape. Can anybody please shed some light? Because everything so far in my learning process is going totally well, except for this little obstacle. I know and understand that it takes a lot of time to probably make some stuff, but are there any tutorials for this? I haven't seen many helpful ones on Google and checked a bit on Youtube. Thanks.

 

@foofy: try this tutorial by Jonathan Williamson - an excellent young Blender artist.

Unwrapping a Female Character

By the way you should check out all his tutorials - Jonathan has a nice easy style.

cheers, gryff

 

Thanks for that, and I will look at that, but I'm asking how to CREATE UV maps in Photoshop for items such as swords, armor, helmets, etc. such as the pictures in my first post.

 

It might help to make sure you're using the correct terminology. The UV map is just data in the model that tells the renderer what 2D coordinate on the texture map to use for each vertex/face on the model. You can export a visual representation of the UV map from your 3D modeling program to use as a guide in Photoshop if texturing that way. The exact method of exporting will depend on the modeling package you are using.

Once you have the UV map guide in Photoshop, it's really just painting after that to create your texture maps. What you posted above are texture maps, not UV maps.

Most 3D modeling packages allow you to paint directly on the model if you prefer doing it that way instead of in Photoshop. Most people I've seen who use Photoshop for texturing do a quick base color pass on the model and bake that out as a texture to use as a guide, as well as bake out an ambient occlusion texture to use as part of the texturing process.

Anyways, I think if you google for the correct terms you might find better information than you were getting. A search for "Photoshop create 3d texture map" should get you plenty of video tutorials.

 

That was very helpful to know that about the UV vs. Texture Maps. And also I know that most 3d modeling programs come with painting right on the object, but from what I have toyed around with though (very little, but I THINK enough to say), it seems almost impossible to make "nice quality" things from hand painting textures. What I mean by that is it seems only not too difficult to make cartoony-type textures while hand painting stuff. My aim for my game is to make a game, but not cartoony, for mobile. How would I go about making texture maps in something like PS? Did the people that made those texture maps most likely use PS? I did a nice Google search, but didn't find anything helpful or of interest.

 

There's lots of different ways people make them. For painting onto the model, ZBrush and Mudbox are popular options. Projection painting can be done in many of those as well (google "<your modeling package> projection painting" if you're interested in that method). Some use procedural systems like Substance Designer. Some use multiple methods.

Some good youtube search terms: ZBrush texturing, mudbox texturing, zbrush spotlight, blender projection painting.

Here's a place you can start. Unwrap your model in your modeling package. Use your packages painting tools to paint a very basic color map (or use vertex colors or material and bake those to texture) and save it out as an image. Bake out ambient occlusion to a texture and save that out as well. You're only using the color map to identify where the different parts of the model are mapped to. So red might be pants, yellow - shirt, etc.

Stick the ambient occlusion in a layer on top of that and set it to multiply with a fairly low blend value. That will bring some more of the detail in and give you some more guidance on where features lie. Then just paint away, use clone brush from other textures, etc.

The most important part is getting a good UV unwrap though, as without a clean unwrap you'll make your life much harder when trying to manually paint stuff. You can get away with a messier unwrap when painting directly onto your model since it will tend to paint over seams nicely, but you should still be cautious of your seams. So if you don't know how to unwrap your models, then start with videos on UV unwrapping for your modeling program.

If you'd tell us what modeling package you are using we could probably direct you to more specific videos on how to do stuff.

Also, if you want to paint textures like those in the images you posted, you'll have to have the artistic skill to do so. Can you draw/paint images like those in the first place?

 

Wow, there is so much to say.I'm using Blender right now. No, I don't have the artistic ability to make those kind of texture maps drawing in real life and on computers. I'm just simply not that good at art, there I said it. And you can texture paint in Zbrush? I am still really confused on all of this, because there is SO much stuff! All different kinds of painting, mapping, etc. Well I just tried out texture painting for awhile in Blender, but it just seems extremely low resolution. I don't want it 4096x2048 or anything like that, but it just seems a little to low for my liking. Would some screenshots be helpful? And I am starting to look at UV and texture mapping on Google.

 

Excellent, Blender is a great package. By asking if you could draw like the images you posted, I just wanted to point out that there's no magic bullet for good art. AAA quality textures look that way because the people making them are talented, not because of a particular software package.

ZBrush does vertex painting, but can handle a high enough poly count that you can get to a 1:1 pixel:vertex ratio when you bake it to a texture.

Blender will paint at whatever resolution you tell it to. It's also possible you were doing vertex painting and not texture painting. Before you'll be able to texture paint you'll need to have unwrapped the mesh and assigned a new texture to it.

Try this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3nS9meV50A I just skipped through it, but it seemed to cover the basic steps.

 

Texture painting isn't all painting. A lot of it is using photographs of the material you want. Clothes for example could be textured with photos of textiles. Most of the good tutorials on texture painting are unfortunately not free.

 

Yeah, I can believe that, and will do thank, thanks Christina. And how do you "change the resolution of your painting"? And no, I wasn't vertex painting, I was texture painting. And an other quick question that will help me out to know. Does the higher the poly count mean the more detailed the painting and textures/texturing will be? I know that a higher poly count is useful for sculpting, but how about when texturing and painting?

 

It depends on the software. ZBrush doesn't paint directly onto the texture, it just colors the verts and then transfers the vertex colors to the texture when you tell it to. So in that case, higher vert count = higher detail. But for Blender (and I think Mudbox, but never worked with it) you are painting directly onto the texture, so poly count doesn't matter.

In Blender, when you create a new texture (Image->New Image in UV/Image Editor window), you can select the size of the texture that's created.

 

Awesome, thanks. I'll look into it more. It's hard for me to focus on this because of all of the different things, names and all of that stuff. Tried doing it, and this was the best that I could do so far, and I don't see how I can personally do any better than this.

 

I've always wondered this too. How is this made:



Is it done before or after the mesh?

 

Pretty much always after. It's hard to do before because you don't know what the unwrap is going to turn out like. Here's a timelapse that shows one way of doing it (directly in Blender using texture painting). http://www.blendernation.com/2014/02/05/timelapse-modeling-and-painting-a-battle-axe/

It's not a tutorial, but screencast keys are on, so you can probably get an idea of how to do various things you're unfamiliar with by pausing a lot and seeing which hotkeys he used.

 

So besides the "painting on" method, what other methods are there? Which is the most common?

 

There is no real substitute for talent. I'm no artist either. The trick is to find some nice textures on CGTextures. Also, learning how to modify those textures to a certain extent helps. Learning how to use photoshop filters also works great. Last thing, learning about Blender's procedural textures helps too.

Combining the above things, it isn't too difficult to create texture brushes for use in Blender's texture paint mode. You can directly use textures you have to sort of "clone" or project them onto the model as you are painting.

Another thing you should learn about which can help. Learn blend modes. This applies to Photoshop(or GIMP) and Blender's blend modes for texture painting. You can do some great things. Example, I have a nice blue for the jeans, but I need to create some variation in the color. I can get something like a grain/wood texture in grayscale(using either photoshop filters or Blender's procedural textures). Then, using certain blend modes in texture paint, you can lighten or darken that blue using the grayscale image directly. You have to pick the right blend mode, and some work more than others. There are also tricks you can do involving blend modes, example there are hue/saturation modes of sorts that you can experiment with to get things right.

Remember, these things won't exactly make you a better artist. You need practice for that. But, they will indeed help you make better art while you are learning. I suck at it myself, but I can get some "acceptable" textures out even so, between filters, procedural textures, CGTextures.com, and a few tricks.

 

I've got some YT tutorials on texture painting a game asset (a small house). Uses Blender and Photoshop. I mention signing up to my mailing list but that is not required now as the videos are all on YT.

Overview

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa7_zxbnGOSaZ0QV8OYmkbDro_O7Xu4Ty

 

This is my method (I'm self thought so I might be going the wrong way about this)

First I'll make my model in blender, for this example I make a peasant house:


Then I unwrap all the faces on to my map, and bake the ambient occlusion (remove the default lamp in your scene before doing that)


Ok once that's done I import the whole thing into photoshop, duplicate the base layer and start painting details. I use textures found on cgtextures.com and apply some very small effects on them. I also use some multiply layers to add some details. (Note this is one of the first maps I made you can see I'm wasting a lot of space in the center)


Then I'll create the base layer for my normal map texture, since unity can import from a black and white image in order to create the normal map that's the way I like to do it (Again it's one of the first one I made so the quality is not really good)


Once this is taken care of I can re-import the texture in blender to make sure everything looks good:


And this is the final result with the normal map shader insde unity:

 

For Make Fast use Blender

 

btw is there a way to save use different UV-Maps in unity? Like I have multiple uv maps for the same object, or do I have to clone objects?

 

Not sure why this thread was revived after 5 years, but yes, a mesh file can have multiple UV maps. In fact, this is how lighting or other effects are often done on meshes. A mesh can also have multiple material slots so different polygons can have their own materials.

 

@Foofy69 and anyone interested.
I suggest you guys check out, some of Blender Guru's, Andrew Prices tuts too.
Trust me, they'll come in handy for stuff like this.