Peel-mapping tools - 3ds Max Tutorial

- Just as with Edit UVs, the Peel Rollouts offers a variety of tools for editing UVW mapping. These range from quick and easy minimal-click solutions and go all the way up to more complex but highly configurable controls such as Palette Mapping. As Palette Mapping will be the subject of its very own exercise, we are going to focus in this video on the rest of the tools found in the Peel Rollout, and taking a fairly close look at how some of them work. This exercise will, in fact, benefit and prepare us for our Palette Mapping lesson, given that many of the options that we look at here will need to be used when working with Palette Mapping also. To make a start, then, let's select our hand geometry once again. Hit the P key so we can middle-mouse zoom a little, and then of course come across to the Modify tab in the Command panel, where we can access the Peel Rollout. Now, to start with, we see that all of the tools here are initially unavailable to us. This, as you probably will have guessed, is because we need to have made use of the Modifier's sub-object modes in order to gain access to them. For the majority, this means starting our workflow in Edge mode. Straightaway, I would like to get a little pet peeve of mine out of the way. Not because I particularly like to grumble, but because it can help eliminate any potential confusion for users who may be new to 3ds Max's UVW tool set. We have already seen in our course up to this point that when engaged in UVW Mapping work, 3ds Max will display UVW Seams on an object as a green line that shows up in the View box. This means that the colorations seen on many of the Seam icons here in the Peel Rollout could potentially cause quite a bit of confusion, as these tools are for creating either Peel or Pelt Mapping Seams, which are not at this point in the workflow the same thing as UVW Seams. In fact, let's engage our Edit Seams tool, and you will see right away as I click a succession of edges in our mesh here, that we are in fact creating not a green UVW Map Seam, but rather a blue Peel Mapping one. For me then, these icons would be a little more intuitive for new users if they instead used this same blue color. Of course, the color of the icons doesn't make any difference to the workings of the tool. If we wanted, now then, to deselect some of the edges we have in order to create a different seam path, all we would need to do is hold down the Alt key and click once more to go ahead and deselect individual edges. Although, we could of course also mark and drag with the Alt key held down to deselect a whole bunch of them. Now we have already seen how the point-to-point Edge Selection tool works in the Unwrap UVW modifier, and here we have a point-to-point Seams tool. The only difference with this of course being that it creates Peel or Pelt Seams as opposed to straightforward Edge selections. As with the Edge Selection version of the tool, we can cut across multiple vertices, and Max will do its best to follow the line-out path that we may have in mind. We will need to remember, though, that in order to back out of this tool completely, we are going to have to right-click twice. This is because the first click will only break off using the current rubber band, giving us the option of starting a new point-to-point selection somewhere else on the mesh. The last of the Edge-based Seams tools here comes in the guise of the Convert Edge Selection to Seams button. This does exactly what it says, and lets us turn a regular Edge Selection, perhaps made using the Grow and/or Loop tools, and turn that into a Peel Seam. Pretty straightforward, as you can see. Once we have a Peel Seam that we want to apply a Peel operation to, we will need to switch over to Polygon Mode, select all of the polygons inside of that seam either manually or by selecting just one, and then using the Expand Seams option, and then we can apply something like a Quick-Peel Operation. This instantly opens up the UV Editor window with the polygon section broken off and already selected for us. Let's hit Under a few times here to get back to our unpeeled state, and then close the editor window so we can take a look at using not Quick Peel, but Peel Mode itself. Now, this again opens up the UV editor for us, but we can instantly see that things are a little bit different. The basic operation that the Peel system has performed is pretty much the same. Only, this time we've been given these pinned vertices with which we can work. This means I can grab any of the vertices in the selection and reshape the UV layout, whilst being certain that these pinned vertices will remain fixed in place. Once we have things shaped as we want, we can of course turn Peel Mode off from inside the UV editor and then work with the UV selection in a regular manner. We can even add pins of our own to the Peel if we, again, want or need to. So, let's turn the Peel option back on, which causes our Pin tools to become active, where we have a number of useful options made available to us including Pin and Unpin Selected. Having taken a look at the more simplified Peel tool options available, then, let's move our understanding forward even further by taking a look in our next video at the way in which 3ds Max's Pelt Mapping Tools work.