Organizing the UV map

- Well, before we go any further, let's go ahead and add a UV test pattern just to see how we're doing in terms of stretching and the size of our textures. So let's go ahead and create a new window right up here again and I'll switch this to a Shader Editor. I'll hit the N key to close that panel and then let's create a new material. We can do that up here. I'll go ahead and click New and we'll call this Dumpster. There we go. Now, recall that it's also over here in the Materials panel here. But let's go ahead and now create a new image node with Shift + A and Texture, Image Texture. Let's go ahead and connect our color up to our color socket on the principled shader and then down here, let's go ahead and click New, and I'll call this a UV Text Texture and I'll change this to, I'm going to go with just the UV Grid, just the black and white and then click OK. And there we go. So here is our UV texture. We can't see it yet because we need to come over here and go to our look dev. I'll click here and we can't see it, well, because we don't have it here in our image texture, so let's pull the menu down and choose our UV Test Texture. All right, there it is. So it looks pretty good. There are a couple of not too big issues here but if you look at the checker pattern here on the bottom panel, these are quite a bit bigger than the ones on the side and the back. And let's go over here. Let's take a look here. This right here is the bottom and if I scale this down, I'll hit the S key and scale it down, those checkers get bigger and if I scale this up, they get smaller and our task here is to try and be sure that within this total object, all of these checkers are proportionally the same size. Now, they could all be this big or they could all be this big. It really doesn't matter how big or small the checkers are. What matters is that that they're all the same size. And we've got a bit of a problem here. So how do we fix that? Well, we can of course, manually go in and scale these up or down to get all the checkers the same size. And sometimes you need to do that. But what we could do is select all of the UV islands that are not our triangle and our wheel because these down here are going to be dealt with as I said, at the end of the process mainly because they're kind of a special situation. We'll deal with these here pretty soon. But let's go over here and I'll deselect everything and then I'll press the B key and border select all of this. So it should select everything except the wheel and the triangle. And then we can come up to the UV menu here and choose Average Island Scale. And what that will do is make all of these UV islands proportionally the same size relative to each other. That they are over here in the 3D view. So let's go do that. Let's press UVs and then Average Island Scale and there we go. Now if you take a look at everything, all of those squares are the same size which means when we apply our texture, say to the front and to the side, our textures will be the proper size. All right, so that we've done that, we need to rearrange things here in the zero to one space. Now, Blender has another tool that can help us do that but keep in mind, it's an automated tool so it may not do it the way we want it to be done. But let's give it a try. Over here under the UV menu, we also have Pack Islands and notice that once again, I'm not including our special situation UVs over here, right? I'm just including all of these. So let's try this, let's try UV and Pack Islands and what that'll do is pack all of the selected items into the zero to one space. Here we go. There we are. Now, notice what it did. It shrunk them all down so that all the squares are now bigger but they are all still the same size now and that's fine, that's good. So is this okay, this is going to be a decent layout for us when we take it into Creda? Well, let me turn off the UV test texture here with the X. As I said, it's still here on the model and then I'm going to press Control + space bar to make this one screen full screen. All right. So let's think about this. Once again, I think I'd like to rearrange these to better represent the 3D object because I'm not sure, is this the back or is this the back or is this the bottom of the dumpster? I think this is the bottom and which side is which here? And are these the rails here? I think they are. And these too, so I'd like to rearrange this so I have a little bit more confidence of what each of the UV islands is. All right, I'm going to press Control + space bar again and let me shrink this a bit. And I'll make this a little bigger here. So what we should do is first of all, figure out what's the front? This is the front here, okay. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my work area here to rearrange these and then we'll put these back into the zero to one space. So I'm going to hit the L key and I'm going to grab this and move this over here. Then what is this here? That's this, okay. So I'll hit the L key and hit G and move that over here. And then this one, that's that, okay. I'm going to hit the L key and I'm going to press R + Control, turn this 180 degrees and move that over here so that I know that now that's the front and these are the sides. Here we go. Let's find the back. Right here. And it looks like it's flipped upside down 'cause here's supposed to be the top but it's down here in the UV map. So I'll hit the L key, press R + Control and spin this around 180 degrees. Hit G and move that. So I'm going to call the back, I'm going to put the back right up here on top of this. Right and then this one, this is the bottom so I'm going to put this down on the bottom here like that. So you can see what I'm doing. I'm just rearranging these so that I know what they are and honestly, you don't have to do this. If you can figure it out yourself when you have the UV map in another program, that's fine but I like to spend just a little bit of time here to arrange things and I think it saves me time once I get to the texturing part. All right, so for the top. I think this right here, this is the one on the right, so I'll just move this over here to the right. I better select everything here before I do that and then press the L key and then move that over here, maybe turn it just a bit like that. And then I'll select this one, bring this over here like that so I know that that's the one on the left. Okay. Now, these over here on the sides, if I hover over this and press the L key and on the inside as well, push the L key, that's these two here. All right, so what I'm going to do is just hit G and move these and then I'm going to grab this one. And move it over here. And this one. R + Control and rotate this and move that into place here. Okay. Now I know that these are the other ones. Turn that. Grab this and move that there. Okay. So now we've got the main part of the dumpster, the lids, the rails, now let's think about these guys here. What are all of these guys? Well, here is, I'm going to Shift + click Seam there so it selected all of that. Here is the top. So what I can do is just take this whole thing and maybe move it up to the top like this. Here. And then this down here, that's the bottom, so let's just grab this. Oops, once again, deselect everything. Then grab that. Oh, that's selecting everything including the bottom down here. I can just press Shift and click to deselect that. And then let's turn this. Hit G and move that into here. All right, so now if we take all of this, hit G and move this into here. We may now need to just shrink this down just a bit. I'll hit the S key and shrink that down. And notice that I'm shrinking everything down proportionally. So all of these are still proportionally the same size compared to each other, right? Let me grab these and just move this in a bit. There we go. So there we have the UV map for the dumpster, the main parts of the dumpster. Now what we need to do is work on the wheel and the triangle here. So in the next video, what let's do is let's concentrate on these and we can place these in this area and in this area over here. So we'll work on that next.