UV Maps?

morrisonmp

Does anyone know of any good, beginner friendly tutorials that explain what UV Maps are and a little bit about how they work?

Thanks in advance.

Richard Haseltine

Are you just wanting this for information, in which case it's pretty simple to explain, or are you aiming to do something specific or understand a particular feature, in which case you may need other information rather than or in addition to the basic definitions.

morrisonmp

I want to start to understand the "inner workings" rather than just the basics of working with completed assets. So, a little of both. I want to understand what they are and how they work.

FSMCDesigns

You are basically defining what part of a texture will apply to a certain part of a 3d model

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_mapping

Richard Haseltine

I think that is a bit overcomplex. Essentially, for each of the polygons that make up a model there is a set of uv coordiantes for each vertex (point) defining its outline. Those UVs define a patch on an image that will be applied to the polygon to set its appearance (or to control some component of its appearance). The UV coordinates go from 0 to 1, where 0 is the bottom or left edge of the image and 1 the top or right edge - as a result they can be used with any size or proportion of image. Daz Studio native models will almost always already have the UV mapping done.

Roman_K2

I bookmarked this old tutorial several days ago. I haven't read it yet, but it seems fairly detailed but easy on the jargon.

https://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/Gen3DTuts/UVMapperTut/UVMapper1-1.html

ShelLuser

Since we're in the new user area and I'm a bit in the mood...

Simply put: a UV map is 2D representation of the texture that is wrapped around a 3D model.

You see... a 3D model (also referred to as a "mesh") has 2 main properties which define its looks. First is the so called material. A material setting basically determines how the surface of a mesh is going to react to light sources. For example..  a ball out of shiny metal is going to reflect much more light than a ball made from mat plastic or cloth. Such a material preset can also define the general color of the mesh.

But next is the texture... what if you want your mesh to show a pattern of some sort? Something very casual for pieces of clothing for example.

The obvious problem of course: how are you going to wrap a 2D image around a 3D object?  Take that ball I mentioned.. you're not going to cope very well if you have a simple 4:3 aspect ratio'd image.

That is why we have UV Maps: to provide us with a 2D image that represents the full surface of the 3D model. I took the liberty to attach an image to my comment which shows you an example of this...

Here I fired up my favorite 3D editor and drew a 3D cube, you can see the original example on the right side (I highlighted it). Then I told ZBrush to create a UV map for me, and I think the results speak for themselves. ZBrush has this nice feature that lets you "morph" your model into an actual UV Map, which is what I did here. You can clearly see all 6 sides of the cube as they're laid out on my canvas.

I hope this could help you to understand this a bit bettter!

morrisonmp

ShelLuser said:

 

This was very helpful. Thanks. This is basically what I was trying to parse out for myself... what exactly are UV Maps. The name is not particularly descriptive or intuitive to a newbie and seeing products that talk about UV Maps for characters and putting them on other characters, etc. I couldn't really mentally frame up what we were talking about. So yeah, thanks. It helped.