From the course: Modo 2019 Essential Training

Understanding UV mapping workflow - MODO Tutorial

From the course: Modo 2019 Essential Training

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Understanding UV mapping workflow

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- [Narrator] This video is going to be an introduction to UV mapping in MODO. So, what is UV mapping? Well, UV mapping is a way of projecting a two-dimensional texture onto a three-dimensional surface. And in order to be able to do this, you need to unfold and map your three-dimensional mesh onto a two-dimensional grid, which you see here. And that will then allow you to project a two-dimensional map onto a three-dimensional surface. So by default, when you create a new object in MODO that object will have a UV map assigned called texture. Now at the moment, although we can see there is a UV map assigned to the object and that UV map is selected in the UV layout, this UV map is currently completely empty. So I've assigned a material to the cube and I've called it 'mapping'. I'm going to add an image map to this material, so I'm going to go to 'add layer, image map' and I'm just going to use the clip browser to add an image which I have already imported. Now as you can see, the cube is now displaying as a solid green, it's not actually displaying the image map correctly, and that's because there are no UVs in our UV map. So, I'm currently in the UV layout of MODO, and the reason for that, obviously, is because this is the best workspace to do any kind of UV mapping work. You have access to the tools and the view ports are setup accordingly. So with my mesh selected, I'm going to switch in to polygon mode and I'm going to run the project tool and I'm going to change the projection type from Planar to Atlas. And as soon as I do that, you can see that the image now appears on the mesh and you can also see that the mesh has been broken up in to individual faces which are then mapped onto the UV grid. So now I'm going to hit "q" to drop the project tool and let's have a closer look at what's going on. So if I select this face on the cube, you can see the corresponding face on the UV map, and if I select this face on the cube, you can see it's corresponding face on the UV map. And because all these faces are separated in the UV map, and in fact there's a small gap in-between them, what you see on the mesh is there's a break in the way the image is mapped and this is called a seam. So, whenever your UV map is not continuous, you're going to get a visible seam on your model. Now, generally, you're always going to need some seams in your model but, you want to try and minimize them so as to minimize any breaks in your texture. And so the real skill in UV mapping is creating an unwrap that has a minimum amount of seams and a minimum amount of distortion, and that's something we're going to be looking at in the next few videos.

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