Creating and unwrapping wooden planks - 3ds Max Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this chapter, we are going to create all the details that is required to finish up this model. Including fixing this portion over here, and in detail, and most importantly will be the planks because this whole structure is composed of planks, even the top portion is made up of planks, this one as well here, these walls, all this structure is made up of wooden planks. So a good idea would be to start with a wooden plank. Now there are several ways, or pipelines, that we can follow. One would be that I create a plank and then populate the whole scene with that plank, and then start editing in the individual planks, and that's going to take a lot of time, and also what usually happens is that artists create a plank or create a whole structure and then take it to ZBrush or any sculpting application and start sculpting details. Now I mentioned this earlier in the beginning of this tutorial that we will not use Zbrush because I'm not planning to take my camera very close to the surface of any plank or wooden object. Instead, my texture would use normal map, which would give me enough detail that is required. Now a very good approach would be to start with a plank, and let me tell you some of the important things we need to keep in mind. The first thing I'll do is go to the top viewport, and I will create a box here, and consider this being a plank, and give it some height. Now if I go to perspective viewport, let's just consider this is a plank. Again, I will go to the top viewport. Now since this plank, if I show you, it has very hard edges, and in my reference image, I see that it has kind of slight roundness or bevel at the edges, nothing is too hard, so I need to bevel this. Another way is that I can go to extended primitives and choose a Chamfor Box, and if I create a Chamfor Box and give it a bit of a chamfor amount, what difference does it make if I use this, or I use a straight one and then add the chamfor later to it? Now here is my point to clarify what I tried to teach here. If I create this with the chamfor amount being applied to it the chamfor box, and I go to modify panel, and I apply an unwrapped modifier to it, and then I open the UV editor, now if I just move this window to a side so you can see the whole options, if I go to polygon mode and element mode and I select everything, and just double checking that the whole plank and all sides are selected, if I go to mapping and hit unfold, and click OK, it's going to unwrap it something like this, which I am never going to use by any means. So I'm going to close that, and now if I do the same, if I select this box and then throw an unwrap modifier over it and open the UV editor and I go to the polygon mode, element mode turn on, select everything, go to mapping, and unfold mapping, hit OK, it is going to unwrap this perfectly in a nice manner, and this is what I actually need. So once this is unwrapped, what I need to do, or I'm going to do, is I will turn this element mode off, and being in the polygon mode, I will select these two polygons over here that actually, if I move this to a side, that actually covers this polygon and this top polygon. And here, in my edit UVs window, I will press control plus B to break it and move it to this side close here. And I'm going to select both of them, now the direction of this depends on the flow of the texture. If your wood texture has a grain flowing from left to right, I would like to have my UVs lay out in this direction, if I have texture that has a UV flow, sorry, the grain flow from top to bottom, then I will have to rotate it, in other words, I can also rotate the texture according to my planks, so that shouldn't be a problem. Now I'm going to scale that up, so it should actually cover most of the region, and if even if I have tileable texture, and it goes beyond this area that shouldn't be a problem. Now I'm going to close that and right click, convert into an editable poly, and I will delete this one. Now I'm going to solo this out by pressing Alt Q, and I will just slightly give it a bit of a height, and then in my top viewport, I will press 2 and select these edges, right click and hit connect, and give it a bit of edges, the amount should be two, and a bit of a pinch. I don't want them to be very hard because later I'm planning to apply a mesh smooth, so if these edges are very close to these edges, then the smoothness won't make the edges very smooth or rounded. Let me just show you. If I hit OK, and go back to perspective viewport, and let me just check, this is fine, now I'm going to select these edges, right click, and hit connect, and this time increasing the pinch amount to maybe 95, hit OK, then I will go to left viewport and select these edges here, go back to perspective viewport and just checking that the correct edges are selected, I'm going to right click and hit connect, and it is very close to these edges, so I will bring that down and hit OK, and then I'll turn the edge mode off, and now I'm going to throw a mesh smooth modifier over it, and now I see that I have added smoothness to it. Now I already have unwrapped it, so if I throw unwrap modifier again here, and open my UV editor, you should notice that my UVs remain the same, all I need to do is select them, go to polygon mode, select everything, and go to tools, hit relax and make it relax by polygon angles, increase the amount to one and start relax, notice that it has shown some movement, it's kind of relaxed, and now I will apply and close this down. So the texture won't have any stretching now. Now in the next video, I'm going to add some a bit of a detail to this plank and make more copies of it from details, I mean that these planks have some cracks and a bit of wear and tear. Now since, like I said, I'm not going to take it to Zbrush, so these cracks over these areas, or the broken effect, I'm going to do that here in 3ds Max, and that too in the next video.