From the course: 3ds Max and V-Ray: Residential Interior Materials

UV mapping objects

From the course: 3ds Max and V-Ray: Residential Interior Materials

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UV mapping objects

- [Instructor] Regardless of where you get your models, you do want to ensure that they are properly UV-mapped. Now, UV mapping basically just assigns the geometry in your model to specific places on your texture. Now, this chair, for example, has two materials on it. And if we look in our compact Material Editor here, you'll see we have this one here, which is the wood texture for the legs. And then we have this other one, which is the cloth material. Now, each one of these has a specific scale to the bitmap or whatever material you have. And you want to make sure that everything is aligned. Now, we can do that through the UV mapping tools. Now, I'm not going to get too deep into it. But if we go into our Modifiers, under UV Coordinates, we have a whole bunch of these. And the two that are really most important are UVW Map and Unwrap UVW. UVW Map, if I were to select these chair legs and scroll down, and we can apply it here as well in our Modifier panel, and what that does is, it basically just does a standard mapping, such as planar, spherical, or box mapping. So for something like this, you might want to do box mapping. And then you can select that gizmo and rotate it however you want to get the grain of the wood to match up with the material that you have. Now, another way to do it is to do what's called Unwrap UVW. And again, we can access this either through the Modifier List on the Modifier panel or go into Modifiers, UV Coordinates, and there is Unwrap UVW. Now, this one is a more complicated surface, so it will need to be unwrapped. And if we go to Unwrap UVW in the Modifier List and open UV Editor, you can see how this is mapped on a polygon-by-polygon basis to the material. Now, up here on the top right here, we can see we have this map. In this case, it's Map 129, which is my fabric swatch. And that's how this will map to that particular pattern. Or if we want, we could turn on any number of checkers patterns, and we can see how this is aligned. Now, the goal here is to align your texture to your model so that it looks realistic. Now, we have all sorts of tutorials on UV mapping. So I'm not going to get too deep into it for this course, because this is really about materials. So just ensure that your models are UV-mapped before you start diving into your materials process.

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