I’ve noticed a bit of an education gap in 3D artists when it comes to UVs. And I’m not saying this to call out any specific school, professor, or group of students. I’m just saying, in general, it seems to be a weak area for many aspiring artists.
This is, frankly, very bad. UVing is a vital stage of production, even if not everybody finds it to be the most creatively fulfilling. It is something that has to be done, and if you want your art to look its best, it’s something that has to be done extremely well. You’ll often hear people say “A great texture can save a terrible model, but a bad texture can bring down the greatest model.” Well, proper UVs are step one in setting up your texture to look great. You can’t paint that crappy model into submission if each part of it has a seemingly different resolution, or is stretching all over the place because you haven’t been acquainted with the unfold button.
And don’t dare start whining to me about how UVs are no fun. Just about any art form you can think of has a stage like this, where you’re not actively creating, but figuring out some sort of puzzle to move on to the next step. In drawing you’re sighting and measuring, in painting you’re mixing your colors, and in animation you’re cleaning up your graph editor. It has to be done, you may as well enjoy it. UVing can be a wonderful time to unwind in between the “oh god if I have a tri here will this explode in a game engine where did those double faces come from” modeling stage and the “Oh god when did my PSD become half a gig” texturing phase.
Now, enough of my ranting. Let me offer some UV theory.
If you have to alter your texturing in any way to suit your UVs, you’re probably doing it wrong. It is extremely difficult to work against distortion, so it’s always best to check for it beforehand. That’s as easy as putting a checkerboard material on your model. (I personally do this WHILE UVing.) Do you see things stretching? Pinching? There’s a problem.
Similarly, if you notice those squares on your checkerboard are REALLY BIG on one side of your model, and REALLY TINY on the other, you’re going to have a serious resolution mismatch on your texture. Ideally, you want that pattern to be nice and even over most of your model. (Smaller details, or things that won’t be as visible, can sacrifice a bit of space for the more obvious pieces.) Just because “Oooh, I have space on my map to make this piece bigger!” does not necessarily mean you should.
Which leads me to my next point: fill up your freaking UV space!! I understand that not every object is shaped in such a way that it’s going to be able to completely fill up a UV map. In such a case, it may be worth trying to find another item (or possibly 5) in your scene that you can combine it with. This is called efficiency, I’m told game engines are pretty fond of it. It also means you’ll have fewer maps and materials to keep track of!
Filling up your UV space does not mean hitting the “autogenerate” button. I looked at a guy’s portfolio recently that was rife with this and, well… This fate could have been avoided if he’d had a sassy gay friend.
Everybody can tell. If you can cram every little part of UV map with something, that is really awesome. I bet you made some good decisions about which pieces needed the most resolution, how pieces needed to be combined for minimum seams, etc. If it worked out just right, I bet you even tried to keep certain things together so it’d be easier to keep track of when you’re texturing.
Maya is not as smart as a person. It will not make these decisions. It will do many, many, many planar maps, and crunch them together as well as it thinks it can. And while the final result on this may occasionally look okay for a very simple or hard edged object, very rarely is it ever going to be optimum. And the time you saved by hitting one button for UVs is going to be wasted trying to figure out those UVs in texturing.
Hotbox > edit UVs > unfold. UV Texture Editor > tools > Smooth UV tool. It horrifies me how long it took me and my friends to get acquainted with these buttons.
I used to look at other peoples’ UVs online to try to figure out how mine were supposed to look. This can certainly help move in the right direction, but it can also put weird ideas in your head sometimes. Again, what’s important is your final results. Their model isn’t the same as yours, so let their UVs guide you but don’t necessarily try to copy them.
Maya protip: Do you ever get that weird glitch where it’s not letting you select vertexes/faces/UVs from more than one UV chunk? Save. Should clear it right up.
UVing is an excellent time to reanalyze and clean up your mesh. Yes, I know you just want to move on and get this done, but UVing and texturing a face that nobody’s ever going to see isn’t going to save you time. If all that face is ever going to see is the ground or the inside of the mesh delete it!
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