UV Unwrapping - Starting from Scratch with Texturing

As I’ve now rigged my model the last thing to do before I could start thinking about animation was the texturing.

I had been putting off the texturing by doing the rigging as I wasn’t looking forward it to it and getting closer to the deadline I felt like I had run out of time to digitally paint the texture for my teddy bear model, as knit is a detailed texture.

Luckily, I had a backup plan – the scan of the knitted piece I knitted back in part 5:

As you can see from the image the colour of the knit is not something that I would want to have as a bear and so I made the decision to edit the colour using a program called Paint Tool SAI, which has an option in the Hue/Saturation to “Colorize” which make the colour of the image all one colour. This was perfect as this yarn I used for the knit piece had many colours throughout it, meaning just editing the hue and saturation wouldn’t give a universal colour to the piece.

After getting the colour I wanted I moved to Adobe Photoshop and created a thumbnail for the texture that would be something I could edit to better fit each of my UV’s. It was at this point that I realised I should probably see how the texture worked with the UV I had created previously

What I found, wasn’t desirable. The UV’s distorted the texture in a very noticeable way, which clearly meant to me that I would need to redo the UV unwrapping. In addition, I also felt that the texture was too detailed, but decided that until I fixed the UV’s I would try to fix that as well.

Coming back to the UV editor after avoiding looking at it again was a little daunting. When I had originally done the UV unwrapping, I was fumbling about and did end up just saying that it would be fine and moved on.

This time I decided to look up some tutorials and found this one:

This is the video that made it click in my head what I needed to do to make clean UV’s. I already had an understanding of the cut and sew tools; however, I hadn’t realised that you needed to have something on the UV editor to use those tools – something that now seems so obvious.

Using a planar UV, I cut the seams for each limb of my teddy bear, selected the shells, unfolded them, then laid them out along the U, except the arms where I laid them out along the V.

You can see that there are some inconsistencies with whether I unstacked the shells or not, however I found that this didn’t end up causing an issue.

Going back to the texture itself I took it into Adobe Photoshop and used the filter gallery and added the “palette knife” filter and adjusted it until it removed some of the detail, but made sure that it would still look like a knit fabric.

As I assigned this material to the model, I used lambert as a base as I wanted to minimise the amount of light it would reflect as it’s a fabric that does not. I did have to resize the image to make sure that all the stitches on the knit appeared to be the same size, but that was easy enough.

For the eyes and nose of the teddy bear, I wanted them to be shiny, like they could be a piece of coloured glass as an example. To do this, I assigned their base material as blinn and then used a very extreme close up of the knit texture as the colour in the hopes of giving the texture some more dimension, however, this isn’t that clear.

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Bibliography

Easy3D (2019). 3D Cut and Sew Tool Maya 2018 (Fast and Easy UV Method) - TUTORIAL. [video] Available at: https://youtu.be/lwDtOEtO_J4 [Accessed 7 Dec. 2019].