Learn how to create a professional UV map in this Cinema 4D tutorial.
We know, it’s not the sexiest topic for a tutorial. But, if you’ve ever had trouble getting your textures to line up just right in Cinema 4D, this will help you out immensely.
UV mapping is one of those things that you can get by without for a while, but eventually you’ll run into a situation that requires it and you will REALLY impress people if you can do it. Your textures will improve a lot and you’ll have groupies chanting your name. One of those statements is true.
So hang tight, and get ready to learn a TON of new info.
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Tutorial Full Transcript Below 👇:
Joey Korenman (00:11):
Well, hello, Joey, here for school of motion. And in this lesson, we're going to talk about something that most cinema 4d artists don't know how to do, how to unwrap UVS in cinema 4d. What's a UV. Well, you'll find out knowing how to do this is essential to creating precise textures in any 3d program. This may not be the sexiest topic on earth, but you're going to want to sit tight and take it all in. Because one day you're going to run into a project where this is going to save you a lot of trouble. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on this site. Now let's get started. So I want to start out by showing you the way that I see a lot of new artists apply textures and cinema 4d.
Joey Korenman (00:53):
So I'm going to start with the most basic 3d shape. There is the cube, all right now, in order to, um, apply textures and in a UV map way in cinema, you have to make the objects editable. So this cube right now, um, it's not editable. You know, I'm still, uh, it still has this object tab over here and I can adjust it, um, and, and adjust segments, things like that. Um, but if I click on the object and hit, see it is now a polygon object, it is, it has been made editable. And you'll see that this little tag has actually been applied automatically. And it's called the UVW tag. Now I'm going to explain very shortly what that is, but for now I want to show you how I started out learning cinema and how I used to put textures on things like this.
Joey Korenman (01:48):
Um, so I would double click in this tab to create a new material. Um, and you know, if you were doing something simple, like making a white cube, you'd drag it on like this, there you go. There's your texture. Now, what if I decided I wanted a picture on this face of the cube? So, but I still wanted the cube to be white. So what I might do is make another texture and in that texture, um, I would load an image into the color channel. So let's go here. Um, and we'll go to my desktop and I have found this very cute picture of a kitten.
Joey Korenman (02:28):
And I want to put that on the side of this cube. So what I usually do is, uh, I'll go into polygon mode, select the polygon I want, and then drag that material onto the cube. Okay. So that's, that's great. All is well and good. Now, um, this actually looks okay, but I can tell the image is actually being stretched a little bit width wise. Um, so by default, when you put a texture onto a polygon and cinema, it tries to scale that picture to fill the polygon, and it doesn't pay any attention to the actual aspect ratio of that image. So this kitten is actually supposed to be a little thinner than this. Um, so then you have to sort of click on the texture tag here and start messing with the length, and then you have to offset it, try and get it to work, and then you need to turn tiling off.
Joey Korenman (03:29):
And so you end up having to kind of do a lot of, you know, finagling to make this work. Um, and then let's say I also wanted that image on this face here. So if I select that and drag the kitten, all right. So what if I wanted the kitten to be rotated 90 degrees? Well, there's not really a great way to do that. There are work arounds and you could do it, but really you don't have a lot of control with this method. It's hard to get the texture you want on the right faces. All right. So that's where UV maps come in. So I'm going to delete all of these texture tags and delete all these textures. All right. So let me try to explain what a UV map is to you guys. And some of you may already know this, but if you don't, you're about to learn something that will make your life so much easier once you get the hang of it.
Joey Korenman (04:23):
So the first thing I'm going to do is switch my cinema layout from startup to BP, UV edit, and BP stands for body paint. Body paint used to be a separate program from cinema 4d, and now everything is built right into the program. Um, and so the BPU V edit layout, um, it brings up some new tools here, and these tools are designed for UV mapping and painting textures. And so on the left here, you're seeing the 3d view ports, which is the same as in the start-up layout over here, you are seeing, uh, the UV map for whatever object is selected. And it will also show you the texture if you have a texture on that object. Um, so if I click on this cube going to object mode here, if I click on this cube and I go up to this menu here, where it says UV mesh, and I hit show you the mesh, you can see now there's this one pixel black outline around the entire frame.
Joey Korenman (05:26):
So this black outline is the current UV map for this box. All right. And I'm going to show you exactly what's happening. So the first thing I want to do is create a material. So I'm going to double click and you can see the material browser looks different now. Um, it's the same material browser. It's just sort of arranged differently to make it more useful for body paint. All right. And you don't really need to know too much about, you know, the layout and how all this works just yet. Um, just try and follow along. And, and I will do more tutorials about body paint because it's incredibly useful. So all I've done so far has created a material. All right. Now, in order to actually paint in body paint, um, you actually need to load a bitmap texture into at least one channel on your material.
Joey Korenman (06:17):
So this material here has a color channel and a specular channel. Now the color channel right now, it's just set to a color, this kind of grayish white color. Um, so that's not going to actually let me paint on this cube because there's no, you need a, you need a bitmap to paint on onto, um, so the shortcut to do that, um, you can see here next to my material. There's a C that means that this material has a color channel right below the C there's a little faint gray X. And that means no image is yet loaded into the color channel. If I double click that X, it brings up this little menu, uh, asking me to make a new texture, right? So I'm going to make the, I'm going to call this new texture box color. Um, the width and the height are both set to 1024 pixels, which is one K it's a very common size for textures. Um, and this gray color is what the default color of that texture will be. So why don't I set that to white?
Joey Korenman (07:24):
Okay. You could see now this, uh, this area over here has turned white because I have this material and this channel selected. It's actually loaded the bitmap that I just created into the UV viewer over here. All right. Now, if I take this material and drag it onto the cube, you'll see the cube turns white. All right. So now we have a material on the cube. We can see the cubes UV map, which right now doesn't look like anything would, it would the UV map right now, what it actually is, is, uh, is every face of this cube has been scaled to completely fill this UV space over here. And actually, it'll be easy to demonstrate if I, uh, I'm going to grab the paintbrush here and I'm going to give it a red color. If I paint anywhere on this, you can see over here, I'm painting on every single face of the cube at the same time.
Joey Korenman (08:18):
Now, why is that? Well that's because this face and this face, and this face have all been scaled up in their UV space over here. So, and this will make even more sense if I, if I can attempt to draw something close to a circle, you can see that on this face, it's stretched a lot horizontally here. It's stretched vertically, sorry, here at stretch wars only to here at stretch a little bit more, more vertically. It's much closer to this than this side. Uh, and that's because, um, a UV map is, uh, a way of wrapping a 2d texture, which is what this is onto a 3d object. And right now all that's happening is this whole texture is being mapped onto every face. So that's why you're seeing it on every single side of the cube. So that would be useful only if this was a perfect cube and you actually wanted the same texture on every side, which most of the time you don't want.
Joey Korenman (09:23):
So I'm going to show you how to fix this. All right. So, uh, if you look over here, the body paint can be pretty confusing. At first. Um, the bottom left-hand side here has the objects and materials tab, and it's also where you pick your color when you're painting. Um, the center area is sort of, this is the attributes area. So if you pick a tool like a brush or a, you know, a selection rectangle, you can set the settings here. And then on the right side, these are all commands related to UV mapping, but also to your textures and their layers, textures, and body paint can have layers just like in Photoshop. All right. So I have a background layer here that now is white with this red circle on it. So I'm going to, uh, I'm just going to take my paintbrush, size it up, and I'm going to pick the white color and I'm just going to erase this.
Joey Korenman (10:21):
Okay. So now we're starting from scratch. So the first thing I need to do is set up the UV map for this cube. So when you want to UV, when you want to arrange UVS for an object, you need to have that object selected. You need to be in one of these UV edit modes up here where my mouse pointer is, body pain is very, very strict about what mode you're in, uh, allowing you to do certain things are not allowing you to do certain things. So in this UV mapping tag, uh, this is where you set up your UVS and do a lot of operations about UVS. And you generally start with the projection part. Uh, this is where you kind of get started unwrapping your 3d object and creating a map that you can then paint on. Um, you can see everything's great outright now.
Joey Korenman (11:11):
That's because I'm not in one of these UV modes. So if I switched to this mode, all of a sudden these are all available to me. Okay. Um, and one thing you have to be very careful of is when you have a, a polygon selection like I do here, I have this top polygon selected. Um, if I do any of these operations, it will only do it to that polygon. So I want to make sure that, uh, I de-select all, all right, so now I have the object selected. I'm in one of these UV modes, and I'm going to hit, I'm going to hit the sphere button first, just to show you what happens. Okay. So when I hit it attempted to unwrap this cube as if it was a sphere, and that just has to do with the algorithms that that body paint will use to try and unfold your 3d object into a, a 2d sort of plane here.
Joey Korenman (12:09):
Think of it like origami. It's trying to unwrap an origami object. Um, obviously this doesn't do us much good. Um, because you know, I don't know which face is which, and there's this weird line over here, and that's clearly not what we want. If we hit cubic, it looks very similar to where we started, where we have a bunch of overlapping squares. That's not what we want either cubic to now, this is much closer. Um, and you may actually think that this is correct, uh, because you can now see that every face of this cube clearly has its own UV area that you could, you could paint on. Um, and you know, it looks like a box that's been unfolded like an origami box. So that's what we want. However, this isn't right. And I'll show you why, if you go into your layers and you turn the background visibility off, there's going to be a checkerboard pattern that shows up here.
Joey Korenman (13:06):
All right. Um, sometimes, uh, in order to get the 3d view to update, you have to move the camera around a little bit. So this checkerboard pattern is made up of perfect squares. And this is useful because if you now look at your 3d object, if you don't see perfect squares, which we clearly don't, these are stretched out. That means that your UVS are not proportionate to the polygons that they are actually representing. So this is going to make it a lot harder to paint, because if I want a, you know, a perfect circle on the top of the box here, and now that we have the UV set up, you can start to see how cool this is. If I move my paint brush over the top, in the 3d view, it also shows up in the UV view and vice versa. So if I wanted to paint a perfect circle, it'd be really nice to just be able to pick a color and then come over here and paint a circle like this, but you'll see on our 3d object, it's actually not a circle.
Joey Korenman (14:05):
And that's because this UV area here, uh, was squared instead of actually made proportionate to the right size. So that didn't work either. So we're going to, with our cube selected, go back to the, one of the UV modes, go to UV mapping projection and hit box. Now, what box does is it does something similar to cubic, except it actually maintains the correct proportions. And so you can see now, if I turn this, turn this off and move this around, we now have perfect squares all over our cube. All right. And this is wonderful for many reasons. So this is now clearly useful, uh, because you can take a paint brush and paint right on this image, and it will show up exactly the way you paint it on your 3d object. Or if you can, you can paint right on the 3d object to, and it will paint over here.
Joey Korenman (15:08):
All right. So if you want to come in and if you're good at painting, um, then you can get some really cool results doing this. Um, and this is really useful too. Um, you can see, for example, here, I can paint along this edge and get a seamless result. Um, and over here, it's actually painting here and here at the same time. So a lot of times when your texts, your painting, you have to kind of use a combination of the two D texture map and also the 3d, uh, object itself. So you can sort of paint over these seams. All right. Um, so this isn't very interesting looking at actually looks kind of silly. So I'm gonna stop. Um, so let me, uh, let me clear out this background. Um, so I'm going to select a white color and I'm going to go edit, fill layer.
Joey Korenman (15:58):
So now I've filled my background with white again. Um, so one of the coolest things you can do now, um, if you have your object selected, you're in one of the UV modes, you can come up here to layer, and there's an, there's an option right here that says create UV mesh layer. So what this does is it actually creates an image of this UV mesh layer. So, uh, when I earlier turned on show you the mesh, and this is again, an example of body paint, being finicky, in order to turn this on or off, you have to be in an object mode, not a UV mode. Uh, so you have to go back to UV mesh, show you the mesh. So you've you meshes off, right? Um, and we have this UV mesh layer because my, uh, my paint color was set to white. My UV mesh layer is white. Um, and it looks a little funky. It's just cause I'm zoomed out. If I zoom in, you can see it's actually created outlines of my UV. Um, and I think I can actually, uh, invert this. Let me try and turn this black. There we go. All right. So now we've got a white background with these nice black lines that represent our UV map. So what's great about this is that now I can come up to file save texture as, and you can actually save textures right out of body paint as Photoshop files. So I'm gonna save this as box color, my nifty little folder. I'm going to go over to Photoshop now and open that.
Joey Korenman (17:49):
All right. So now we have the texture open in Photoshop and this UV mesh layer we can turn on and off to, you know, show or hide where our polygons are. Um, and in Photoshop, you know, I'm a lot more comfortable in Photoshop. A lot of the things you do in Photoshop can be done in body paint, but I generally work in Photoshop because I'm really fast at it. I know it a lot better. Um, but what I'm gonna do is open up this image I found, which is kind of this cool looking crate Ottoman, and I'm going to cut out the front of this. Great. Just like that. Okay. And paste it in here. All right. Now it's clearly skewed. So I'm going to try to try to straighten it as best I can. That's close enough for now. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm a scale is down and I'm going to line this up
Joey Korenman (19:13):
Like that. All right. Um, and then I'm going to, uh, I'm going to come in here and I'm just gonna, just kinda manually adjust. So it fits a little better. Okay. Now you probably already starting to see the benefit of doing texturing this way. I have complete control over exactly what image goes in here. If I wanted to rotate it, I would just rotate it like that. If I want to adjust levels on just that piece, I can, and I could call this side one, save this Photoshop file, and then I can turn the UV mesh layer off. Save one more time. And now if I go back into cinema, come up to file and say, revert texture to save. It will say, do you really want to revert? Yes, you do. What it's doing is reopening the texture that I've modified in Photoshop, and it's reopening it in cinema.
Joey Korenman (20:11):
And it has the same layer setup as Photoshop. Here's my UV mesh layer, which was turned off and here's side one. And if we spin this box around, we can see there side one. Um, one thing I'm going to change really quickly in my material. You can see how the preview of this materials, very low Rez and kinda kinda grungy. Um, that's cause this is a one K texture. Um, but cinema by default doesn't preview textures at one K. Uh, and you can change that if you click on a material and you go to editor texture, preview sizes default, right now, I'm just going to turn that up to one K. So now I can actually see a pretty high quality preview of what that texture looks like. All right. So now I could go back into Photoshop and line up the other sides. You can also do this directly in body paint.
Joey Korenman (21:09):
Um, you can take this, this layer here, um, and you can do all of these buttons down here, make new layers, make copies of layers, delete layers. So this, this button with the yellow square on top of the white square makes a copy of whatever layer you have selected. So I could call this side to grab the move tool and just move this over to the next square. And you can see in real time what you're doing too, which is pretty cool. So you can, uh, you can go through in line all of these images up, or you could find different images and put them on top, um, and make this look like whatever you want. And I'm not going to go into detail about what, you know, different texture channels you'd want to make this look real. That's that's for another tutorial, but hopefully this shows you, you know, the benefit of taking the time to set up a proper UV map, you can, you know, you can have layers and, you know, you can even clone stamp if you, you know, if you wanted to, uh, you know, let's say just real quick, if I copied this layer and I moved it over here and I just wanted to stretch it to fit the top, kinda like that.
Joey Korenman (22:29):
Okay. So now we've got this side wrapping around to this side and this side, um, you know, if I'm looking, I'm sorry, I'm hitting the wrong button. If I, uh, if I look at the same here, I'm seeing some white pixels here. There's probably a, some image area here that that needs to be cleaned up. You can actually add a new layer, grab the clone stamp, uh, set the clone stamp to all visible layers. And you can actually use a clone stamp on the seam here and, you know, grab, grab a piece of image and paint it in and, and sort of work on the seams this way, too. Um, and then once you, you know, if, if you know a little bit about painting or if you, um, just want to kind of mess around, um, sometimes especially on 3d objects, it's cool to beat up the edges a little bit. Um, and it's really easy to do that, um, with this method. So you could add a new layer. Um, you could pick a color, you know, like, let's say you wanted to just add a little bit of, of a highlight to this or something you could, uh, pick, maybe pick a color from the texture itself to use as a highlight color. And you can turn the opacity way down on this layer and just kind of come in and just, and just paint it a little bit.
Joey Korenman (23:59):
And you can see you just kind of get this grungy, grungy newness to it. And then you can take this layer once you're kind of happy with the general shape, you can blur it a little bit. You can come up to filter and you can, you can add a little bit of a blur and you can see what it's doing, and you can see the here's before and after. And it just adds like a little highlight and it kind of marries these two edges together. Um, and if I, if I render this going back into object mode here, you know, you can see you're starting to get, you know, kind of looks like a computer game crate right now. Um, but you can see that with, with some work, you could actually get a really nice result doing this. So that's part one. Uh, I showed you how to unwrap and texture.
Joey Korenman (24:48):
A box a box is about the simplest object you would ever be asked to texture, but the good thing is now, you know how to do it. The next thing I'm going to show you, uh, as quickly as I can is how to unwrap an object. That's much, much, much more complicated than this box. So I took an object and I'm going to switch my layout back to start up for a minute. So this object actually comes with cinema 4d R 13, which is what I'm working in. Um, and I removed all of the, you know, other objects around it, his eyes, his pants, his hat, and things like that. Um, so we can just focus on the body and the head of this kind of alien looking guy. All right. And to actually the body and the arms and everything are inside of a hyper nerves.
Joey Korenman (25:33):
So I'm going to turn that off for a minute so we can see the mesh. All right. So here's your mesh. Now, if you wanted to try and put a face here and a shirt on him and fingernails and things like that, there is no way you could do that without getting a clean UV map of this. Um, it won't even be possible because the UVS, if they're overlapping, you're never going to be able to paint accurately, and you're never going to get the resolution you need with your texture maps. So unwrapping something like this, uh, is really good thing to practice, because if you can unwrap this, you can unwrap just about anything. Um, so let's start by trying to get a good UV map for the head of this. All right. So let's go back to BPU V edit layout. Um, I'm going to take the, uh, I'm going to leave the hyper nerves off because that'll just make it confusing.
Joey Korenman (26:30):
So with my body object selected, I'm an object mode right now. I'm going to turn on show you the mesh. Okay. Um, and you can see there's actually no UV mesh and that's because there's no UV on the body object, that little checkerboard tag that showed up when we put a texture on, on the cube, that is actually the tag that stores the UV information. And without that, you can't actually unwrap or do anything to an object. Um, so the quickest way to get a UV tag is to just make a new material, put it on the object and you can see immediately UV showed up over here. Okay. Um, so now with the object selected, I'm going to go into UV mode and go to the projection tab. Now you can see that the projection, the projection tab is still great out and that's because there actually is no UV tag over here yet.
Joey Korenman (27:26):
And that is because, um, when I applied the texture, because there was no UV tag on the object, the texture defaulted to spherical projection instead of UV. Uh, so what you have to do in this situation is control, click, or right, click the texture tag and hit generate UVW coordinates, and it will create a UV tag. And now you can actually start working with UVS. So I'm going to, uh, make sure I don't have any polygon selected. I'm going to go select geometry. De-select all. And I'm just going to show you why this is tricky. If I try these projection settings here. So sphere makes a mess out of it. Cubic makes a much worse mess cylinder. You can, you can actually kind of tell what's going on. This is the head, these are hands, but the biggest problem with things with UVS like this is that all of these UV polygons here they're overlapping each other.
Joey Korenman (28:30):
So if I drew a line here, it would wrap all the way around the arm and that's not what we want. And you can see that none of these really give us what we need. So with an object like this, you have to do a little bit more work. So the best way to start is to break the object into manageable pieces. So we're going to start with the head. So what we're going to do is first select all the polygons of the head. So we're going to go into polygon mode up here, and I'm going to use my, a lasso selection. Make sure you have only select visible elements turned off.
Joey Korenman (29:07):
And then we can just select all of these polygons. All right. And you see, we've got this little neck all the way up into the head. Everything's selected. It's nice. All right. So now, well, usually when I, when I do UVS, I want to, um, I first want to clear what's already in here, um, because it'll start to get messy otherwise. So I'm going to quickly undo what I just did. I'm going to, uh, I'm going to select every polygon, switched to UV mode and then come over to here to UV commands and hit clear UV. And it will, you can see what it actually did. It took all of UVS and it scaled them down to zero and stuck them up in the corner, kind of hide them away for you. All right. So now I'll come back here, select the head and the neck again. I didn't get the neck that time.
Joey Korenman (30:02):
There we go. And I'm going to use a frontal projection to get us started here. So I'm gonna go to the projection tab, make sure many UV edit mode here, and I'm going to hit. And I just selected the arms by mistake. I'm going to hit a frontal. Now what it's actually done is it's, it's projected the UVS from the top view, which is not what I wanted. Some hidden undo. Uh, whichever view is active when you hit frontal, that's the view that body paint will use to project the UVS. So I want to make sure I'm looking at the front view because the reason I'm doing it this way is because when I'm painting a face, it's easier to paint that face when you're looking straight at it. So that's, that's the direction I want the UVS to be facing. I don't want the UVS oriented, like, you know, the characters facing sideways.
Joey Korenman (30:57):
I want to see the face laid out flat for me. So all I need to do is click on the bar above front view. So now it's selected. Now, when I hit frontal, you can see that this UV layout matches this. Okay, now we still have all of these, uh, UVS overlapping because obviously we're seeing the front and the back of the object at the same time. So the next step is to take these polygons and unfold them. All right? And that is called relaxing the UV. Now, when you do this, if you think of this head, uh, as an origami object in it, you need to somehow unfold it. Well, the only hole in that object where you could actually unfold anything right now is this neck. Um, so body paint doesn't know how you want this unfolded. Um, it's not smart enough to know that this is a face and this is the front of the face or anything like that.
Joey Korenman (31:57):
You have to, you have to give it a hint. So the way you do that is you tell it which edges it should cut and then try to unfold the object. Um, and this takes a little practice, um, to do, but once you get the hang of it, uh, it starts to make a lot of sense. So if we want to, we basically want to be able to paint on the front of the face all as one piece. So we're not going to cut here. Um, and generally you try to make as few cuts as possible and try to place the cuts in areas that are not as visible. So for a head it's usually the very back of the head. All right. So to do this, I usually like using the path selection tool. If you hit you to bring up the selection menu, um, and then the command we're looking for is path selection, which is M so you M um, all right, so I'm gonna start down here at the bottom of the neck and, uh, the UVS actually start one polygon up here.
Joey Korenman (33:03):
Um, but it doesn't matter for this purpose. So I'm going to just start tracing this edge and the path selection tool, basically just lets you draw from one point to the next. Um, and I'm holding shift to continue my path and I'm going to go all the way up and I'm going to stop at the top of the head. So now we've got a nice seam in the back. So imagine that when I hit relax, it's going to peel the head open, uh, you know, like an orange or something, and then it's going to unfold the face flat or it's going to attempt to all right. So now I have an edge selected. I have the beginnings of my UV map. So I'm going to go back into a UV edit mode. And now I'm in the relax UV tab and you have a few options here, uh, and you want to make sure that cuts selected edges is checked.
Joey Korenman (33:58):
And that's actually, what's going to tell body paint, look at what edges are selected and then place cuts there. Uh, this LSEM versus an ABF option. These are just, uh, slightly different algorithms that it can use to unfold. And you, I don't really know what the difference is. I'll try one and then I'll try the other and see which one works better. So I'm gonna hit apply and you'll see, we've got a very strange result here. Uh, I think that is because I'm an undo. Uh, I have pin border points checked, which I shouldn't have had checked. So I apologize. Uh, so make sure that that's unchecked. I'm not exactly sure what that does either, but, uh, it clearly messed up our result here. So now with that unchecked, I'll hit apply lo and behold, look at what we have here. Now. This may not make a ton of sense right off the bat looking at it.
Joey Korenman (34:50):
Um, but I'm going to show you why this is now incredibly useful to us. Um, so the first thing I want to do is, uh, orient this a little better. You can tell that it's kind of slanted. Um, it's probably clear that this is the face and these are probably the eye holes right here. And this is the neck down here. So I want this to be facing straight up. Um, when you're in these one of these UVM modes, you can use the same keyboard shortcuts you can to transform, uh, models and other objects in cinema 4d. Um, that the hotkeys that I use are the four or five and six keys. If I hold four, I can move this. If I hold five, I can scale it. If I hold six, I can rotate it. So I'm going to rotate it until it's more or less straight. All right, close enough. All right. So now here is our head UV mapped a scaled down a little bit.
Joey Korenman (36:00):
There we go. Good to go. Alright. So now we need to, uh, we need to do the same, uh, set up for this texture that we did for the one, for our box. We needed to create a bitmap to paint on, to be able to, to see anything happen when we tried to paint on this texture. So there is a color channel on this material, but there's, there's no bitmap in it. So I'm going to double click under here and also you'll see this red X next to the material. It means that the material is not loaded into memory. So you have to click that X to load it. And then double-click under the sea. Again, body pain is so finicky. If you forget one step, it doesn't do what you need. So you'll have to do this 20 times before, you know, you'll, you'll stop forgetting things.
Joey Korenman (36:51):
And even then you'll forget things. Cause clearly I still do. Um, so instead of a one K texture, why don't we do a two K texture here? So we'll do a 2048 by 2048. Um, and let's make the skin a little alien color. You know what, maybe like a, kind of a yellowish brown, green. Great. All right. Now, if we come in here and I'm going to add a new layer to this texture, and I'm going to pick a color, maybe I'll pick white. So now as I move the brush around here, you can see on the model that we have a nice, pretty nice symmetrical UV map here. And if I wanted to bring this into Photoshop and, you know, find some leathery texture to make the skin and then, you know, find some weird creature, eyeballs and nostrils and things like that, I could do that.
Joey Korenman (37:51):
Um, it would be kind of tricky right now because I'm not really given much of a, an idea like where's the nose, where's the mouth, things like that. So what I usually like to do before I send this to Photoshop is create some guides for myself. Um, so I'm going to go over to the objects tag, the objects tab. I'm going to turn the hyper neuro back on, um, because that really affects the look of the alien quite a bit. And you can see, I can still paint on the object or on the UV and still see what it's doing. Um, so let's say I want the nose to be something like that. Now I have a guide where the nose is. Um, the eyes are a little more obvious, but if I wanted let's say eyebrows or something, um, and then a mouth, you know, do you want the mouth down here?
Joey Korenman (38:40):
Do you want it a little closer to the nose, maybe there. Um, and then let's say that, you know, you were going to have hair on the Caelian for some reason. Uh, it's not obvious from this where the hairline is. So, uh, it's always a good idea to kind of give yourself, you know, some help. So you know, where the hairline's going to be and easy is very uneven. So you have to kind of, you know, this is a rough guide. This is more of a, more of a suggestion than anything else anyway. So you can see now that, uh, all of this area here, this is all the hair.
Joey Korenman (39:27):
Okay. And I know where the eyes are, can even paint those interview on, uh, you know, where the eyebrows are, where the nose, the mouth, you have guides for everything. And if you want to know, you know, it's, this is the neck, it's pretty obvious that this is where the neck is, but if you wanted to know exactly where the neck is, you could just kind of draw a line there and on your UV, you can see that the lines I'm painting, they follow the contour of these polygons. So now, you know, that's the neck. All right. So now you have a pretty decent map that you could bring in to Photoshop. You could, uh, you know, obviously use the same trick where you would go up to layer and say, create UV mesh layer, save a Photoshop file and bring that into Photoshop and then create your, your alien texture and reload it in cinema and be good to go.
Joey Korenman (40:20):
Um, so now that we have the head, I'm going to delete this for now. Let's, uh, let's get the body unwrapped. The buyer is going to be a little bit trickier. All right. So what we need to do is first select all of the polygons of the body and the hands. So I'm going to go into polygon mode here. I'm going to turn the hyper nerves back off, and I'm going to hit command a, to select everything. Now we don't want the head selected. So what I can do is go back into UV polygon mode, and you can see that in that mode, I can see which UVS are selected as well. If I hold command and draw a selection box around this, it will. De-select those polygons. So I've deselected the head now. So I had now just have the body selected.
Joey Korenman (41:11):
Now, I think for the hands and the arms, it'll be a little bit easier to, you know, it'd be easier to paint the hands, looking down at them, then looking at this angle. So I'm going to, uh, I'm gonna start my projection from the top view. So I'm making sure that my top view is active. I'm in a mode. My body's selected, and I'm going to go to UV mapping projection and hit frontal. All right. And now you can see, it's put those UVS directly on top of the face. I'm going to hold down for, and I'm going to move that down like this. Now it's going outside the boundaries of the UV map. That's okay for now. We can always shrink it down. All right. So now this is a good start, but obviously we have tons of overlapping polygons and this is a very complicated shape. Um, so we need to cut some edges and let body paint unfold this again.
Joey Korenman (42:08):
So unwrapping characters is something that takes a lot of practice. Um, and to be honest, I'm not very good at it. I don't do it a lot. Um, but it's one of those things where once you do it a couple of times, uh, it's kind of always done the same way. Um, I've seen hands done a couple of different ways, um, and the way I'm about to show you, um, is pretty useful if you, you know, if you really wanted a lot of detail in the hands of, so make it pretty easy to paint them. However, there are better ways, uh, you know, and you can always make it easier on yourself by doing the hand separately. You know, we're doing the body, the arms, the elbows, the forearms, and the hands all in one go. Um, and a lot of times you would separate that out.
Joey Korenman (42:57):
If this character is wearing gloves, for example, um, then it makes no sense to try and do this all in one piece. Um, but for the purposes of this tutorial, Michelle had to do in one go. So I just put a, a seam down the back of this character here, and I'm going to extend this seam up couple more polygons just in case. Um, and now what I'm going to need to do is figure out where to cut for these hands. All right. Now I want to be able, the most visible part of the ceiling is going to be the top of the hands. The bottom won't be as visible. Um, so I'm going to try to create a seam where I'll basically have the top of the hand and then it will be mirrored by the bottom of the hand. Uh, and, and that way the thumb will be sort of linking the top and the bottom of the hand together. All right. So I need to figure out which seem to cut here. Uh, and I think it's, it's where it's whatever seen this as here, cause it's right in the middle of the fingers. So I have the back selected that back edge. I'm going to hold shift and I'm going to start drawing this seam here, and I'm just going to follow it all the way back to this seam. All right, now I'm going to come back here and I need this seem to go all the way down the hand through all the fingers.
Joey Korenman (44:36):
And this is one of the reasons the pass selection tool. So great. It'd be really hard to, um, to use the, the direct selection tool and get these little bitty edges that are kind of hidden in there. When you use the path selection tool, you can just kind of draw the direction and it will figure it out for you. All right. So now here, I need to kind of decide where my seams going to be, and I'm going to try and hide it in the crook of the hand here, um, comes down, the thumb, comes up this side of the thumb and then that side's done. All right. So that's the same for one side. So now we have to do the same thing on the side, and this is very tedious and there's really no way around it. Unfortunately, a lot of, uh, a lot of things you have to do that involve characters.
Joey Korenman (45:53):
They're very tedious. It's just the nature of it. If you want to work at Pixar, you can do this a lot. All right. So here, uh, we have the same issue we need to, uh, go down, hide it kinda in the crook of the hand here, come around the thumb up the side of it and one last edge and we're good. Okay. So we have a nice edge to cut in theory. We'll see what happens. And, uh, so now we're going to go back into a UV edit mode and we're going to go to the relax UV tab. Cut selected edges is checked. Pinboard points is not going to hit, apply, cross our fingers. And here we go, this is actually a good result. I'm going to a scale this down really fast and make sure that I fit it inside the UV area. Now, one thing you need to keep mine when you're UV mapping, you want to maximize the amount of area you using, uh, because you have basically 2000 odd pixels by 2000 odd pixels here.
Joey Korenman (47:06):
And the only part of the texture that's actually going to be put on your image is the part that falls on top of these UVS. So this big area here, this big area here, this is just gets wasted. So it's basically free texture information resolution you could have that you're not using. So, um, you know, that, that's one of the reasons that unwrapping the whole body like this, isn't usually the way you'd go, because you can see it creates this very funky shaped object here. Um, and now I don't have a great, you know, I don't have anything to put in the middle here, so that's just going to kind of get wasted. Um, I could rotate this maybe, um, but then it's gonna make it trickier to paint. So I don't want to do that. Um, so for the purpose of this tutorial, this is what we're going to stick with.
Joey Korenman (47:54):
Just know that, uh, it's best, if you can separate things out. And that way you can really fill the space with UVS and get as much texture information as possible. Um, in any case, I am going to select the, uh, the face here that Facebook polygons de-select these, uh, and I'm going to scale that up a little bit so we can get a little bit more info out of that. Cool. All right. So now I'm going to make a new texture layer and I'm going to make guides for the body now. Um, so maternal hyper nerves on and with my, a red color here.
Joey Korenman (48:35):
So these are the UV maps for the hands that we just saw wrapped. Um, and you can you'll know because of the way we cut it, that the thumb is here and then the rest of the fingers are here, but I don't know which sides top and bottom. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here and I'm just going to paint fingernails on the tip of each finger. And now I can see clearly where everything is and then I'll do the same on the thumb. All right. So now you know where all the fingers are. Um, then I'm going to put a mark where the wrist is.
Joey Korenman (49:16):
And so I'm basically just doing the same thing I did with the head. You know, I can make a line where the elbow is now. I know that's the elbow. Um, and then here's sort of, you know, if this was a short sleeve t-shirt, that might be where the sleeve is. I'm just kind of giving myself some guides. Now in this unused area here, you could even leave yourself little notes, you know, wrist, elbow. Um, so, you know, if you were preparing this for someone else, you could hand this off to them and make their lives easier and, and they might buy you a beer later. Um, or it'll, it'll just make your life easier if you're doing a whole bunch of a UV unwrapping. Um, so, uh, so yeah, so now this guy is basically ready to go. You could kick this out, go into Photoshop, um, and, uh, and start putting a face on it. Um, and just to make sure this works, um, I'm going to do a quick test. So what I'm gonna do is, uh, going to object mode and I'm going to create a UV mesh layer. Um, I'm going to name these a little better. So I have my UV mesh layer. This is body guide, and I have already gotten rid of my face guys. I'm going to quickly just paint the face guide one more time.
Joey Korenman (50:47):
So my nose was there, eyebrows mouth hair with somewhere like that. Okay. Um, so now I'm going to save this as a Photoshop. All right. So we'll call this, uh, alien head going to Photoshop and we will open up that file turn on our UV mesh layer so we can see we've got our, got our guides here. Um, and now I'm going to bring in a picture of my daughter line because I happened to catch her facing the camera, which is not easy. If you have kids, you know, that that's, that's rare. Um, and I'm going to paste that photo here. I'm gonna try my best. I don't know how well it's gonna work. I'm gonna try my best to line it up to the face. So I'm going to put it under the UV mesh layer. I'm gonna turn the, uh, Malia the face guide on for now.
Joey Korenman (51:55):
And the first thing I want to do is do a very quick mask just on her face. Okay. All right. So the eyes of that alien are down here. I'm going to actually apply this mask so I can use the transform tool. So, um, in Photoshop, uh, you have a great tool. If you hit command T you have your, uh, your transform tools here. Um, if you then control, click that, uh, you can use the warp tool and you can actually stretch the image out and kind of warp it to make it fit almost any shape you want. Um, so I know that the eyes need to be here. I can kind of reposition those. Um, my right now, my face guide is, uh, my face guide is underneath that layer. So let me put that on top. All right.
Joey Korenman (53:06):
So let's go back into the warp tool. Um, so I can adjust the nose, just the side a little bit, this size, right on the money, and then the mouse in the right spot. So that's pretty good. Um, let me turn the UV mesh layer off and, uh, turn the face guide off and just to see what this looks like. I'm going to save this, go into cinema and revert the texture. Yep. And here we go. Success, I guess I'm not sure if that is success. Uh, but you can see that, uh, you know, we have successfully mapped a face to this and, you know, you'd have to clean this up. You may want to, um, you know, you probably want to add another layer, grab that, that skin color and kind of start feathering in the skin tones a little bit. Um, so you can start to fill in the skin on the side here.
Joey Korenman (54:10):
So you still have a lot of work to do to really make this texture where, but you can see that, uh, it was really easy to line everything up and get it where we want it. Um, and, uh, you know, if we wanted to make a blue shirt and, you know, white sleeves and then pink skin, it'd be really easy to, to put color and images and texture exactly where we want. Um, and then if we wanted to do things like bump mapping, or displacement maps, you can still use these UVS, do all that, um, and have total control. So there you go. I feel like this was a very long tutorial. I hope it wasn't too boring. This is really, really useful. Um, and if you learn how to do it, you're going to impress people. You're going to get more work, um, and your life's going to be easier.
Joey Korenman (54:55):
And that's the most important thing. So thank you guys for watching, and until next time, take it easy. Thanks so much for watching. Now, you should be ready to tackle unwrapping UVS in cinema 4d and get those textures looking killer. If you have any questions or thoughts, let us know. And we'd love to hear from you if you use this technique on a project. So please give us a shout on Twitter at school emotion and show us your work. And if you learned something valuable from this video, please share it around. It really helps us spread the word, and we totally appreciate it when you do it, don't forget. Sign up for a free student account to access project files from the lesson that you just watched, plus a whole bunch of other amazing stuff. Thanks again. And I'll see you next time.
