Unwrapping a character takes a long time but it is critical to the outcome of the final product. When you unwrap, you are taking the faces on the 3d mesh and flattening them out on a 2D space so you can bring it into Photoshop to texture the mesh. It is kind of like CAD but not so boring!
Before I do any unwrapping I always make sure I have a special plug-in installed in max. It is called unwraptools 1.4 by Steve Johnsonand it can be found here.
Then I also make sure I have a 3 rd party program called Deep UV by Right Hemisphere. I used the 30 day trial since I am a broke college student but it will work fine for what we are using it for. I pulled this from their web-site.
“Deep UV is a breakthrough UV mapping technology for the creation and modification of UV mapping for n-polygonal models within an interactive 2D and 3D UV mapping environment.”
You can download the trial or buy the program here. (it is not too expensive)
Now that we are done getting all of the tools that should be in Autodesk’s 3dsMax, we can begin unwrapping our model and get it ready for texturing!
Unwrapping Overview– Getting Started :
Open up Max and load up your file. Before we do anything make sure your model is in one piece and has no open verts (remember when we mirrored over half the mesh) Make sure your modifier stack is collapsed. Right click on Edible Poly icon and select Collapse all. I do not like to have more than 2 modifiers on my edible poly at a time. Now select your model and under the Modify tab chose the Unwrap UVW modifier. In the end it should look like my screenshot shown below.
Now that we added the modifier we can start unwrapping the models faces. First we have to run the “unwrap tool 1.4” script so we can use its awesome tools. Click the utility’s tab then under the utility’s pull down select max script. Under the Max Script pull down select run script and find the file called Macro_UnwrapUI.
We are now ready to start unwrapping the model. We will use the unwrap UVW editor inside of Max.
Unwrapping Overview– Getting Started :
With the Unwrap UVW modifier selected, go to the parameters pull down and click “Edit…” Your Editor should pop-up. Notice the unwrap tools 1.4 docked on the right side of the window. These are the result of the script we opened earlier.
You probably noticed the big mess of crap in the middle of the editor. That’s your model! It’s a lot like dumping out the pieces of a puzzle before you work on it. I select the mess and move it to the left. Keeping the main area clean for working. All of the tools speak for themselves so please take some time to look through them.
Now we have one more setting to check. Inside the UVW Editor click Display > Show Vertex connections. This will allow us to see what verts connect to each other inside the editor without having to check in model space.
