Using the Unwrap Modifier; a How-to for ME

[Marshall_Craft]

I've received some advice on how to go about using the unwrap modifier and exporting an image so that I can add some texture and detail to it using photoshop, but I still need a bit more clarification on what my workflow should resemble. This is my first attempt at an exterior rendering, and I don't plan on getting it up to the same level as I often find in this forum, but I would LOVE to better understand how I can go about making my materials look a little more organic/realistic. Below is one of my two shots (the other is an aerial.) I detached the road so that it is its own Editable Mesh. My material on this mesh is now just a VrayMat with an image in the bump slot (not doing much for me in my opinion...) Anyways, I have a UVW Map modifier applied to the road mesh, using just planar mapping. I then have an Unwrap UVW modifier. I don't understand what exactly I should do next. Have I already taken the wrong path? The program crashes when I try to use the Textporter plugin to export the entire road object. I guess I can chop it up into several objects (by detaching polygons, right?) but I still don't understand exactly how I REMAP the texture back onto the object even if I am successful at exporting it into Photoshop.







Any light someone can shed on this workflow would be great, and sorry if this is universally understood, but I'm way beind the curve I guess.

Thanks in advance.

- Alex

[Marshall_Craft]

alright, my deadline is quickly approaching...if you're reading this and you even have a faint idea of what I should be doing, then please, just write a few words, and I'll do whatever leg work I can to figure out the rest.

Thanks again.

- Alex

[glorybound]

Mapping

Hmmm. I also want to learn more about this. What I have done in the past, and I know isn't the best way, is to render just the parking lot and roads like in your second image and open the image in PS. I do my tweaking in PS and use the tweaked image in MAX. I hope this helps for now. You might also want to read the VRAY help about texture baking.

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150R...king_part1.htm

[Marshall_Craft]

Okay, so you just render from a Top view with a black or white background or something? And then just reapply the image as a diffuse map with a planar mapping UVW mod I guess? that seems the easiest way that I can think of. I looked a bit into texture baking, but I got the impression it was really for game-developers, but I'll read up some more. Thanks, and I'll give that a shot.

Does anyone else have any different suggestions?

Thanks.

- Alex

[travistlo]

I never worked with UVW mapping in max. But I think since the object your working with is flat, then I think what you said will work considering you are in a deadline crunch.

[jrandom]

This may not be what you want to learn if you are on a tight deadline. It isn't really that difficult to get everything unwrapped (obviously depending on how complex your model is) it is just time consuming and well painting and assambling good texture in PS can take a bit of time.

But anyway a couple of tips...

If you are crashing max you unwrap may be to large. When you have the edit uvw window open does you map fit inside of the bottom left-hand corner in the edit uvw workspace?



Scale them all the same to get them to fit or you'll have some bad map voodoo happen:P things won't look right. You should be able to export ok with texporter after this change (if that is indeed the problem), just guessing here...

You probably don't need a great LOD for most of the parking lot, only what is close to the camera. You may want to break up the lot into a couple different maps.



Suggested learning:

CG-Academy has a great DVD specifically about the unwrap uvw modifier. It is definitely worth the cost if you plan on doing this type of work.

Gnomon has one as well: http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/dvds/tjo01.html

[Marshall_Craft]

I actually bought the two DVDs on UVW unwrapping by Chis Thomas, and even made it through the first one. The intermediate one just seemed like it was geared so much towards game-designers that I stopped watching. I'll pick it back up after this deadline (and a vacation hopefully.) Thanks for the advice, and I guess UV's are my next major hurdle.

Peace.

- Alex

[jrandom]

I broke down the beginning of this year and decided to hunker down and learn more about uvwunwrap. The mysteries of the unwrap modifier had me baffled for a long time so I never used it. It make mapping a heck of alot easier thats for sure.

[panthon]

Hi!

If u want to create a texture for your road, you are on the right way. Just go to your top view and render a hi-res still from it. How high? Well, the higher the better, providing that you have to cover a large amount of terrain. I suggest u use no GI whatsoever, you just need a template to paint on.

Don´t mess with UV modifiers, just render it. Then bring that to photoshop and start painting, copying, whatever. Once you are done, apply it to your mesh in max, using, now, a planar UV map and move it using the modifier gizmo until it fits, scaling if necessary. That would cover it all up. You dont really need Unwrap for this.

That's the easy way to do it and it only works for flat surfaces. A building would be a different story...you should split it in pieces and it´s task consuming...

Hope it helps!

[jrandom]

If u want to create a texture for your road, you are on the right way. Just go to your top view and render a hi-res still from it. How high? Well, the higher the better, providing that you have to cover a large amount of terrain.

Yeah totally makes sense but why would you waste all the resources/rendertime to add a 4-10K map for parts of the lot that you won't see?

As it looks to me really only need a 1/4 of the parking lot image posted, and only a 1/4 of that is close to the camera.

I mean if your planning on doing a large scale print of the image won't that be tasking enough on the system without adding a large amount of detail that isn't even going to get seen?

[GeorgeP]

As it looks to me really only need a 1/4 of the parking lot image posted

isn't there an aerial view too?

What Panthon said is correct, you don't UVW Unwrap at all for this. Render the roads from above (in fact your second image would do for a template, at a higher res).

Paint over it in PS, just giving general indications of light and dark - dark/dirty near the kerbs and light where the vehicles wear down the asphalt. You don't need a massive resolution just to indicate areas of light/dark and clean/dirty; using a blurry image will look fine. Then mix this map with a small procedural noise or bitmap for the smaller details, and do the same for your bump map.

In fact, thinking about it furher, I would do this:

use a mix map (Map #1) in the diffuse slot: 50% Map #2: the large painted light/dark map, then 50% of Map #3 which would be:
2 bitmap asphalt textures at a different tiling (probably repeated many times, maybe a tiling of 50 or so), mixed using a procedural noise.
Use something similar to Map #3 for the bump map.

UVW Unwrap is for complex, often organic objects where you have lots of parts overlapping one another and you need to disentangle the faces.

Good luck!

George

[jrandom]

isn't there an aerial view too?

Yes there is, would you use the same map for a close-up as you would for an aerial shot?

You would have to export a heck-of-a-large top view to get your low-level shot to look half-decent. Seems like a waste to me, I'd do two maps, hack an slash for the aerial and a cleaner/detailed one for the camera shot.

That just my opinion though.
I am not an archviz person so I am not really sure what your clients expect.

[CCS]

I wouldn't bother unwrapping this either.

Another thought occurred though. What if you use the same pavement mat you normally use that works at the required LOD, then use that recently posted PS-like mix map to multiply a hand-painted grime map (not hi-res) onto the more detailed texture?

I haven't tried it, but it would seem like a perfect fit.

[GeorgeP]

As it looks to me really only need a 1/4 of the parking lot image posted

isn't there an aerial view too?

What Panthon said is correct, you don't UVW Unwrap at all for this. Render the roads from above (in fact your second image would do for a template, at a higher res).

Paint over it in PS, just giving general indications of light and dark - dark/dirty near the kerbs and light where the vehicles wear down the asphalt. You don't need a massive resolution just to indicate areas of light/dark and clean/dirty; using a blurry image will look fine. Then mix this map with a small procedural noise or bitmap for the smaller details, and do the same for your bump map.

In fact, thinking about it furher, I would do this:

use a mix map (Map #1) in the diffuse slot: 50% Map #2: the large painted light/dark map, then 50% of Map #3 which would be:
2 bitmap asphalt textures at a different tiling (probably repeated many times, maybe a tiling of 50 or so), mixed using a procedural noise.
Use something similar to Map #3 for the bump map.

UVW Unwrap is for complex, often organic objects where you have lots of parts overlapping one another and you need to disentangle the faces.

Good luck!

George