WINGS3D Mini Tutorial How to create UV Maps by Lito Nicolai June 2005 HTML Version and Additions by Hans-Rudolf Wernli     «Shroomfin» by LitoNico prompted the writing of this mini tutorial >   — Introduction —   Moving the Camera To move the camera in the X- and Y-direction, click on the centre mouse button and move the mouse around carefully. Just click the left mouse button to freeze the scene. To move the camera in the Z-axes, press the centre mouse button and move the mouse. If the button is released, the camera is in the X/Y move mode and you have to left click to freeze the scene.   Selecting and Deselecting When the mouse is near a selectable part of the object, that part becomes green. When clicking the left mouse button, that part becomes red, which means it is now selected. When clicking on a selected part, it becomes unselected. To deselect everything, hit the space bar on the keyboard.   Pre-Requisites This tutorial assumes that you (the viewer) have a decent knowledge of Wings 3d and a good familiarity with your paint program. I am using Photoshop Elements 2.0 for this tutorial, but anything in the same league as Photoshop and PaintShopPro will work. If you do not have a paint program, you can download Gimp for free from http://www.gimp.org/   Pre-Work Before starting anything, make sure you have the «Geometry Graph» and «Outliner» open. Window > Geometry Graph Window > Outliner Open the model you would like to UV map, or create a model. I have created a simple mushroom using the Extrude function for use in this tutorial. To enter AutoUV, go to Object Mode, select your object, right-click and you'll see on the bottom of the menu «UV Mapper». Click on it. A window will pop up in the right-hand side of your screen. Expand it to fill your screen, and hit the «o» key to change it to orthogonal view. UV Mapping: Cylinders: these are the most difficult objects to UV map. I am using the stem of the mushroom to demonstrate my technique. First, select the cylinder you would like to UV map in Face Mode. Right-click and select a colour (it really doesn't matter the colour, just select one — it won't make a difference later). The colours are used to separate the UV into pieces. Different colour, different piece. Once you have your cylinder coloured, select an edge that runs along half of the cylinder, right-click and select «Mark Edges for Cut» and you'll see the edges turn green. This is about it for the cylinder. Others: all other shapes are fairly obvious, except for the fact that you cannot map a closed shape (in other words, you have to have at least one cut line or one face coloured differently from the others). Unfolding: once you have all faces coloured and cut appropriately, right-click with nothing selected and go to Continue > Unfolding. After unfolding, you will see the faces flattened out how you specified. If you like, scale and move them, but do not deform their shape. Once you are done, right-click and «Create Texture». Make sure to «show edges». The size can be anything. Do not close this! Just shrink it and put it into a corner. Go to the outliner, which should have a square called «diffuse». Right-click on this and select the «make external». Save it as anything you like; this is your UV map. Paint Program Work: Use whatever paint program you would like for this. Photoshop works best but anything with a clone brush and layers will work well. Find a picture on the web (or take one, if you have a digital camera) of the texture(s) you want to use for your UV map, and import all of these into your paint program. Also import the UV map. Put all of these into one document as separate layers. Duplicate the background, and then delete the original. This ensures that the background is not locked. If you want to use a texture, duplicate it and hide the original. This is to ensure that you can use it over and over again without deforming the original. If a texture is too small, use the clone brush to expand it without deforming it. I cannot really document the procedure, because each time it is different. Finishing Up: Save the finished UV map over the unfinished one, go back into wings, right-click on the «diffuse» and hit «refresh». This should show you the end result, though not with all the details of the UV map. You can then export the object as a 3DS or OBJ format, as those are the only formats that I have been successfully able to export the UV map as well as the Model. Lito Nicolai — A Step-by-Step Example – Create a Cylinder by rightclicking in the window. Go into line mode by selecting the pyramid with the red edges. Select all 16 lines that make up the top. Rightclick and select from the context menu «Scale» > «Radial Y», then move the mouse to make the diameter of the top smaller. Watch the number in the upper left hand corner. Stop, i.e. leftclick, when the diameter is at 20.00%. We have a cropped cone.   De-select the lines and select in the face mode four faces, 90° apart. Rightclick and «Extrude» > «Normal» until the number in the top left corner shows around 1.0. Thus, we have created four wings that are fastened on the cropped cone. Not a very elaborate model, but it will serve the purpose of this step-by-step exercise.   Lets get to the main topic: UV Mapping. Select the Object mode and since some sides are still selected, the whole model gets selected. Rightclick to open the context menu. All the way down at the bottom, click on «UV Mapping».   The AutoUV window opens. Move and scale it as appropriate. In the Face mode, select the twelve faces of the remaining cylinder, rightclick and give them a colour (AuvChart1 was used at left). De-select all by hitting on the spacebar and you will see the colour given. Now select the top and bottom circle and give them another colour (AuvChart2 was used at left) like you did before. Hit spacebar to deselect. Finally, select all five faces of each of the four wings and give them yet another colour (shown in the picture at left, AuvChart3 was used). Then, deselect all. You see your model coloured now.   Rightclick to open the context menu again. This time, select «Continue» > «Unfolding». This creates the outlines of this model as UV Map.   A window with the UV Map opens. Rightclick in this window to open another context menu. Select «Create Texture».   Make sure you have the same options selected as shown at left. The size, in fact, is not important. It will be the size of the picture with the map. 512 x 512 is a good choice, if you are going to use very high resolution pictures for the map, you might want to increase this.   Go to the Outliner window, rightclick on «diffuse» and select «Make External …» from the menu. In the up popping Save dialogue, give the file a name. Do not change this name anymore.   This is the externalised UV Map you will now have to open in your favorite graphics application and put on your pictures, as Lito Nicolai explained above.   For the sake of this example, I just coloured sections using the Magic Wand. This is certainly not the most elaborate use of UV Maps, but it serves the purpose here. When finished with the colourisation of the UV Map, save it under the same name and filetype as you opened it in the first place. The filename must not change, remember?   Go back to Wings3D and the Outliner window. Rightclick again on «diffuse» but this time, select «Refresh» to load the coloured map and wrap it around your Model. Actually, you could skip this step. You could always wrap the UV Map around your model in Bryce. We will discuss this option further down. For the time being, we stick to the description by Lito Nicolai.   Here, you see the renewed UV Map. After refreshing a refreshing sight. Also note that the small white square below «diffuse» now shows a thumbnail of the UV Map.   Make sure the model is selected. Open the File menu, select «Export Selected» > «3D Studio (.3ds)… and save your model along with the UV Map. You could also export as «Wavefront (.obj)…, both export the UV Map and both can be imported into Bryce. The 3ds/obj and mtl files must be in the same folder as the UV Map picture!   After importing the model as object into Bryce and opening the Materials Lab shows the imported UV Map as material in channel A, Parametric mapped. This example is from 3ds: Diffusion is at 255, a value that cannot be set manually.   As mentioned above, the UV Map picture can be impor- ted into Bryce separately. Thus, the "refreshing" step in Wings3D could be skipped.   Here this incredible masterpiece is rendered in Bryce, look at it and be awed ;-) Working with UV Maps has a lot of advantages. Each face of even an elaborate model can be textured separately, complicated drawings can be put on them. Compared with procedural materials, we miss any bumpiness, of course. This can be added through the other channels (B, C, D) in Bryce, however.   Hans-Rudolf Wernli   HTML Version by Horo - 3. July 2005.