Commonly Used Methods for Unwrapping UVs in 3ds Max
In this article, Fox Renderfarm, a leading cloud rendering service provider and render farm in the CG industry, will share with you some commonly used methods for unwrapping UVs in 3ds Max. The installed version of 3ds Max is quite old, it's 2014, but overall it doesn't make much of an impact.
To edit UVW, you can open: Modify panel > Unwrap UVW > Open UV Editor.
1. Top toolbar
The toolbar contains controls for manipulating texture sub-objects in the viewport and controls for setting options.
Mirror and Flip
From top to bottom, they are horizontal mirror, vertical mirror, horizontal flip, vertical flip.
However, the difference between them is that flipping can cause the model to separate along the selected edge.
But the mirrored model remains as a single entity.
Unwrap option - mesh
If the model needs to be imported into an engine, for example, to create some UI material animation, the grid is an important point to consider. The order and proportion of UV arrangement are relatively important.
Clicking on Open will bring up the Unwrap Options interface.
Checking Show Grid, the normal range is 0-1, which means each grid is 0.1.
Grid Size can be used to adjust the frequency of the grid.
2. Bottom toolbar
The two bottom toolbars include:
Selecting and transforming sub-objects.
Enable display of the Attributes toolbar.
Select vertices, edges, and polygons (faces) using the method of switching selection by element UV.
This is the simplest command but also the most commonly used and practical one.
Expand UV selection
First, select some points.
Click to expand UV selection. (Note the change in the number of selected points.)
__Shrink UV selection __
First, select some points.
Click to collapse UV selection. (Note the change in the number of points selected.)
UV painting selection
Once UV painting selection is enabled, press and hold the left mouse button. You can use the mouse to select vertices, edges, and polygons by sliding it. Next one is to enlarge the brush size, and then to shrink the brush size.
3. Dialog box roller panel
It contains multiple roller panels that provide various tools for editing texture coordinates. Rotate around axis -90 degrees/rotate around axis 90 degrees. These two commands can be used to quickly rotate UV when arranging UV.
Horizontal spacing/vertical spacing/straighten selected items
When displaying some tubular object UVs, horizontal spacing/vertical spacing can be used together with the straighten selected items in the Element Roller Panel to reshape them.
First select the UV and click on the 'straighten selected items' option. This command needs to be activated in polygon mode.
Then select the edges (in red) as shown in the figure.
Click on vertical spacing, and you can see that the spacing between them is properly displayed.
Quick Peel
Generally, when processing UVs in 3ds Max, selecting Quick Peel is usually the first choice. Basically, Quick Peel can meet the needs of unfolding most UVs without the need for other commands to adjust them. If adjustments are needed, Relax can be used, and then Quick Peel can be clicked again.
As shown, this part of UVs has not been unfolded.
First, select an edge and click on 'Break'.
Click on Quick Peel in polygon mode.
Transform Elements - Resize UVs
The Resize UVs function in the Transform Elements panel can adjust the size of UVs that have already been split, making them suitable for display. As shown, the texture density of the UVs is not uniform.
Select two at the same time.
Click on 'Rescale Elements' to automatically arrange them into appropriate sizes and match their densities.
4. Summary
Personally, I don't often use 3ds Max to unfold UVs. Usually, I use Maya and RizomUV to process UVs. However, sometimes for convenience or when the UV requirements are not so complex, if there is a large amount of models, importing and exporting can take a lot of time, even with so many plugins available now. Therefore, for some relatively simple models that are not too complicated, they can be directly solved in 3ds Max.
Source: hxsd
