To
begin, I'm going to reapply "Flatten
Mapping" with the settings as shown
at the right. This is as good a starting
point as any, since I only have to clean
up the mapping coordinates I don't like.
(Most of the larger chunks should be
usable.)
One
of the first problem areas on my object
is the cockpit - it's curvature is too
great for Flatten Mapping to place all
of its polygons in the same UVW mapping
clump. So what I'm going to do is select
all the faces of the cockpit in the
perspective viewport, then in the Unwrap
UVW modifier rollout, click on "Planar
Map".
The
result isn't quite ideal - the new mapping
coordinates take up almost as much space
as all the old ones combined, but it
can be easily rotated and scaled back
down to something reasonable. I put
the scaled coordinates off to the side
for now - we'll rearrange everything
later.
I've
been at it some more, planar mapping
continuous chunks of polygons. But now
I've reached a point where I've got
a lot of polygons surrounding the main
body of the ship that planar mapping
just isn't ideal for. A cylindrical
map would be best. (Obviously this may
not apply to your mesh, but I just want
to show you the technique.)
I
applied a "Mesh Select" modifier,
and selected all of the faces that I
thought would work well with cylindrical
mapping. (Selecting the faces in the
Unwrap UVW modifier, unfortunately,
doesn't work.)
When
I finished selecting faces, I added
a "UVW Mapping" modifier.
I changed the mapping to "Cylindrical"
and hit "Fit". This gave me
the results I wanted. I then added another
"Mesh Select" modifier, but
didn't select any faces. MAX keeps track
of which faces you have selected, and
we want to be able to work with the
entire mesh when we get back into our
next Unwrap UVW modifier, not just the
ones we cylindrically mapped. That done,
I applied another Unwrap UVW modifier.
Once
again, the mapping coordinates aren't
quite ideal, so I need to scale and
move them so that they don't overlap.
It would also be nice to break this
large chunk up a bit. To do this, I
selected the faces that I wanted to
become a separate element, then clicked
on Tools->Break (Ctrl-B). Now I can
move those faces off to the side without
also stretching the adjacent faces.
I
found a couple situations where some
faces could be joined easily without
overlapping, even though planar mapping
wouldn't work quite right. When you
apply Flatten Mapping, these usually
end up as chunks of one or two polygons
just sitting on their own.
You
can join these polygons together pretty
easily by going into edge mode (make
sure "Select Element" isn't
checked), then select the common edge
on one of the two elements you want
to join. Note that the common edge on
the other element turns purple.
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Clicking
on tools->Stitch Selected will connect
the elements together (click "ok"
on the stitch tool dialog - the default
settings are fine.)
I
stitched together a few more elements,
but there are a few overlapping polygons.
A simple solution here is to just weld
the vertices together to make one continuous
piece. It'll cause a little stretching,
but if it's on a small polygon, you'll
never notice. To do a target weld, click
on Tools->Target Weld, then click
and drag a source vertex onto its destination.
Much better!
You
can see I was able to connect together
a nice run of polygons using the stitch
tool and target welding.
Using
the above methods, I've managed to clump
most of my polygons together into nice
UVW groupings, and get rid of most of
the clusters of only one or two polygons.
Now all that's left to do is fit all
the mapping clusters back into normal
texture space (denoted by the blue square.)
Fortunately, Max provides a tool to
do this too.
Click
on Tools->Pack UVs, and fill in the
options as shown. Hit OK! You should
get a nice, even distribution of polygons.
Of course, you can do it manually by
rotating and scaling chunks. This will
usually give you better results, but
it's much more time consuming. You can
also put matched segments on top of
each other to conserve texture space.
And
that's it! You've seen most of new mapping
tools, you've seen how to do a quick
job of mapping your object, and you've
seen how to do it all manually if you
need to. I reccomend using a utility
like Texporter
to export the mapping coordinates to
an image, which you can use as a basis
for your texture map.
Just
one section left in this tutorial, and
that's a bit about a handy utility called
Deep Paint 3D. But first I'd like to
mention two other useful improvements
in Max 5.
First,
Max 5 supports nearly all Max 4 plugins.
This has its obvious benefits. Second,
Max 5 added support for Photoshop's
.PSD format, up through Photoshop 7.
It also detects when a texture file
has changed, and automatically updates
the viewport. This makes texture mapping
an object a breeze - just load the .PSD
file in the material editor, and whenever
you change the texture in Photoshop
(and save), Max will load it automatically.
Now, on to Deep Paint 3D.
