UV mapping the sole - MODO Tutorial

- [Instructor] The modeling of the shoe is now complete. And all that's left to do is to UV map geometry. I'm going to start by UV mapping the sole because that's the most complex mesh. So it makes sense to tackle it first. And the sole is a procedural mesh. I can actually UV map it procedurally; however, that does come with quite a big overhead, especially if you have a relatively complex unwrap, it does mean that for example, every time you open the scene Modo is going to have to recalculate UVs. So in this case, it does actually make quite a lot of sense to freeze the procedural mesh, UV it destructively so that you get better performance. So that's what I'm going to do now. I'll come over to the item list, select the sole bevel mesh. I'm going to right-click and then locate freeze mesh operations in the menu, and I'm going to select the duplicate and freeze option. So that's going to preserve the procedural mesh but it's going to make it invisible. If I expand the item list and scroll down to the bottom you can see that we have a new destructive mesh called sole bevel two. I'm going to rename this to just sole. I'm going to change its editor color from blue to pink, and let's drag it with the other pink meshes. Then I'll restore the item list and let's just scroll down to locate that mesh. And when I'm UV mapping, I find it very helpful to hide all of the background meshes. So I'm going to do that now by clicking on this icon. Next I'm going to open a UV panel here on the left by clicking this icon and I'm going to switch to the UV tools. I also have to select the correct UV map that I want to work on, so where it says UV none I'm going to select the default map, which is named texture. And as you can see we already have some UVs in here, but they're not any good, so let's delete them. I'm going to scroll down to the bottom of the UV tools and locate the button that says delete UVs and let's just get rid of those. And now I need to work out a strategy to UV map this rather complex mesh as efficiently as possible. And I'm going to do this by using two specific tools. The first is going to be selection sets and the second is going to be a UV cut map. And my main concern is that I want to avoid having to make laborious manual selections because when you unwrap a mesh, you have to define the seams, and doing this manually on a matter of this complexity is likely to be quite time consuming. But with the help of selection sets, I should be able to speed this process up. So I'm going to start by clicking on this icon here to open the selection sets pop over, and then I'm just going to drag it to pin it. Then I'm going to scroll back to the top of the UV tools panel and I'm going to click on the cut map button which also opens a pop over, and I'm going to drag that over here to pin that. Now, one thing I can use to my advantage here is the fact that I've already defined some materials on the shoe. And if I click on this button in the top toolbar I can actually select by material. So I'm going to start by selecting the material that's assigned to the tread, and once I have that selection made, I can convert it to a regular polygon selection. If I come over to the polygon button on the toolbar and hold the alt key, you can see I get the option to convert the existing selection to a polygon selection, so let's do that now. And next, I'm going to save the selection as a selection set. I'm going to come over to the selection sets pop over. I'm going to click on new set, and I'm going to call this tread and click okay. Next I'd like to shrink the selection so that it only includes the top of the treads. So I'm going to hold the shift key and press the down arrow and that will shrink it by one polygon. And I'd also like to save this selection as a selection set. So I'm going to come back to the selection sets pop over, click on new set once again, and I'm going to call this selection set tread tops and click okay. And what I'm trying to do here is to isolate the sides of the treads, because they're the one part of the model that would take the longest to unwrap if I was to try and unwrap them manually. So instead of unwrapping them manually I'm going to select those and unwrap them using an atlas unwrap. Let me show you how. So I'm going to come back to the selection sets pop over. I'm going to select the tread selection set. Let's click on add to selection. Then I'm going to select the tread tops and I'm going to click remove from selection. And that basically isolates my selection to just the sides. And then I'm going to come over to the UV tools and run the UV projection tool. I'm going to set the projection type to atlas. And as you can see that unwraps all of the treads in one go without me having to define any seams manually. So once I'm happy with the unwrap I'm going to hit the Q key to drop tool. So as you can see, the big advantage of doing an atlas unwrap is that it's extremely quick and you don't have to define seams manually. The disadvantage is that it creates a lot of UV islands and a lot of seams, but in this case even with a careful manual selection we would have had to have a lot of seams anyway. But having taken care of this one tricky part of the mesh I can now unwrap the rest of the mesh manually using the cut map. And the first step will be to use my current selection to define the first set of seams. So with this polygon selection still active I'm going to come over to the top toolbar and I'm going to hold the control button and that's going to allow me to convert that to a boundary selection, so let's do that now. And with those edges selected, I'm going to come over to the cut map pop over where it says UV scene. I'm going to click on new. Let's just call it UV seam, the default name. And then I'm going to click on the add seam button to add those edges into my cut map. And with that first seam defined, I now want to hide all of the polygons that are already unwrapped. So I'm going to click back on the polygon selection button. With that selection is still active, I'm going to hit the H key on the keyboard to hide those polygons. And now I can complete the cut map with some manual selection. So I'm going to switch back into edges mode and let's start defining some seams on the shoe. Let's zoom right in on this area here. Select this edge, hold shift, select the edge above it. And then using the up arrow, I can expand that selection. Let's just tumble the view port to look back at the front of the shoe and then using the up arrow I'm just going to continue expanding that selection until I reach the seam at the bottom. With that done, I'll click on add seam to add that seam to the cut map. Next I'm going to do exactly the same thing, but at the rear of the shoe. So let's tumble the view port and take a look at this end of the shoe, select this edge, hold shift so that's the edge above it, and then use the up arrow just to continue expanding that selection. Once I get here, I'm going to click on the add seam to add that to the cut map. I'm also going to add a couple more seams on the side and that's just to avoid having really large UV islands in my unwrap. So let's zoom in to this area here, select this edge, hold shift at the edge above it, and then use the up arrow to continue expanding that all the way down to here. Add that to the cut map. And then I want to do the same thing on the other side. I also want a seam going on this edge here all the way around the shoe, so I'm going to use my material selection mode in order to create that. So let's switch to the material selection and select this material, and let's convert that to a polygon selection by holding the alt button. And then I need to convert that to an edge boundary selection. So holding control this time, I'm going to click on the edge button. That's going to make my selection for me. And then I can add that to my cut map. Then I'm going to need to take a look at this hole in the center of the sole. So let's zoom in on that. And I'm going to double-click on this edge to select the entire loop. Let's add that to the cut map. Let's do the same to this edge up here. Add that to the cut map. And then let's split up seam in the center. So let's select these edges, add them to the cut map. And let's also break it up on the other side, again to avoid having a very large UV Island. Then I'm going to zoom out a little bit and let's take a look at the sole. So I think I only need to add two sets of seams here. So let's zoom in here and I'm going to start selecting here and then using the up arrow, I'm going to extend that until it meets the next seam down here. Let's add that to the cut map, and then do the same thing on the other side. Now the up arrows aren't going to work at this intersection because we have a pole. So I'm going to need to hold shift and then just manually select those last three edges. And let's add those to the seam. And then I can zoom out. And with a cut map now defined it's time to unwrap the mesh. So I'm just going to dismiss the selection sets pop over just so I've got a clear view of the UV window. And then in the cut map pop over I'm going to click on the unwrap and relax button. And then I'm just going to click in the view port to initiate the unwrap. So the initial unwrap isn't too bad, but some of these UV islands are a little bit large and I'd like to break them up a little bit further. So to start with, I'm going to hit the Q key just to drop the unwrap tool and let's zoom in on the UV map and take a look at some of these UV islands. So first of all, I can see that there's some overlapping UVs here. And in order to fix that, I'm going to need to add another seam. So let's just rotate the view and take a look at the top part of the model. What I need to do is to double click on this edge to select the entire loop. And I need to add that as a seam in my cut map. Next, I want to break up these large UV islands. So I'm just going to select a seam roughly in the middle of the UV Island, add that to the cut map and then let's do the same on the other large UV islands. Double click to select an entire loop, add as a seam to the cut map, and then just keep doing the same thing. And with that done, I'm going to try another unwrap. So let's click on the unwrap and relax button in the cut mat pop over. Then I'll click once in the UV view in order to initialize the tool. Now this unwrap doesn't look that great, but I can fix it by changing one setting in the projection settings. So I'm going to change the initial projection from planar to group normal, and that's going to update to a much nicer unwrap. So with that done, I hit Q to drop the tool. Then I'm going to hit the U key to unhide the polygons that I'd hidden earlier. With that done I'm going to pack everything. So let's click on this pack button and just accept the default values and click okay. And that has given me a pretty decent unwrap without having to do a ton of manual selections. So the final step will be to relax the mesh, because if I zoom in, you can see there's still some distortion. This is what these red and blue areas denote as long as you have this show distortion icon checked that is, of course. So I'm just going to zoom out, and with my entire UV unwrap in the view, I'm just going to run the UV relax tool. Let's click in the UV view in order to initialize it. And I'm going to set it to the adaptive mode. Now to UV unwrap this entire mesh is going to take quite a lot of time, so I'm just going to pause the video while Modo does its calculations. And once the relax has finished calculating I'm going to drop the tool and I'm going to need to repack. So let's click on the pack button once again, click okay with the default settings, and that will complete the unwrap of this mesh.