Original subtitles

Before we start to apply any textures to our object, we of course need to do some UV mapping

so our 3d object is properly mapped into 2d texture space and

right now we can just switch to the UV editing workspace and

They'll basically enter the edit mode of whatever object you had selected

So now I will just tab out of this feather and select the body object. We'll start with that

So if we tab in and look at the texture space here, you can see there's no

UV mapping basically all of the geometry is mapped to one large square

so, of course, we'll need to change that and

You might already know that one of the easiest way how to UV map something is to use the smart UV project that blender can

Provide for you. So if you press U and smart UV project, let me just confirm this for a second

You don't need to repeat this

we will see that blender has unwrapped all of this and

Created these islands of geometry for us. This might not work properly

here when we need to paint over the body and

Some like tattoos over hands or something because these islands might be disconnected on

Places you don't want them to be disconnected and this might create some issues and visible seams for you and stuff like that

So when you want to UV map a body like this

Sometimes you're better off by doing this manually and that's what we are going to do right now

so let me just hit slash on an armpit to isolate this in the local view and

We don't need to undo this kind of thing because anytime you do a new UV unwrap

You replace the UV information on that vertex and it just changes here

So don't worry about this right now and we'll do the unwrapping with this low poly geometry

Even though later we will need to apply the one level of subdivision to the model so we can rig it

The UV coordinates will transfer to that higher poly object. No problem

So actually it's a little bit easier to do the unwrap right now when we still have our low poly cage here

We can start right away by switching to the edge select if you don't have it active already and just alt clicking

The loop right here

where the shoulder ends and then pressing U and

Picking mark seam you can do this from the

Edge menu as well. So if you press ctrl E you have the mark seam option for the edge menu

but in my opinion, it's faster to just press U and

Clicking the mark seam from the menu here. So you will see right away that there's a red line

all over this edge and

it marks the place where

The UV coordinates will be cut into islands

So right now we can just I'll click the loop here. Press U and mark seam

Now this still isn't enough because even though we have separated the arm from the hand and from the shoulder

To successfully unwrap it. We need to do one additional cut along the length of the arm

So it can be unwrapped like paper and most of the time you need to do this on places

That you think might not be visible that often

So for example here

We might want to pick this edge right here since it's at the bottom of the arm since probably it won't be visible

Too often so let's just click here and then ctrl click here

To select this edge then U and mark seam

Now if we select everything and press U to unwrap you will see a bunch of cluttered stuff

Unwrapped here, but if you now select only the arm, you can see how this is

Correctly spread into the UV to the space and that's what we want to do for the rest of the model

So we can just continue by adding some more seams

And now I will go back to the edge select and select this loop right here. Let me check if this goes

All the way and I don't think so because right here we have triangles

So the blender doesn't know the loop continues there so we will additionally so we can help ourselves first of all by

Deactivating the subdivision modifier. So we better see the model and toggling the x-ray and

We want to shift click this edge under the armpit

So we connect the whole loop and now we'll press U and mark seam and again

Don't forget we need to do a cut right here as well. And since we marked already

this edge here

We can continue right there. So U and mark seam

We can now move to the hand right here. Let me toggle the x-ray and

And right now I will try to isolate the top part of the hand here

So I will click this one here and then ctrl click here

so don't forget we want to include these triangle faces right there as well and now ctrl click here and

Continue along these lines and now we can do a cut there and close up here

So I will now press U and mark seam. So this whole part will be separated and unwrapped

And now we can do the same at the bottom so as you can see

Our last seam was here so we can continue by separating

there and continue along these lines, don't forget to include these triangle faces here as well and

continuing all the way up here and

And here so shift click this edge as well and then press U and mark seam

Okay, and don't forget we need to do one more here as well so the arm is

separated completely so

press U mark seam and

Right here

This might look a little bit tricky

But if you switch to the face select with 3 and then hover over some of these faces and press L it will

Select the linked faces only within the bounds of the seams. So this way you can easily

check whether

Your seams work or not

so let me deselect all and now we want to select this part right here and

And

There's a very easy way how you can unwrap this whole part

If we go back to the edge select and start selecting with this edge

then

By holding shift at this one here and going from this side all the way up here

Where the seams end we can press U and mark seam

So this way if you would imagine

Unwrapping this like paper you would first bend this one here

Then it bends all around the thumb

Stretches all over the palm so we can now try

To unwrap this whether we are right or not

so I will hover here press L to select this whole part for unwrapping and press U and

Unwrap don't worry about the size right now

But we can clearly see that the whole thumb with the palm was unwrapped correctly

And if you want to better see if this will work or not

We can open the side panel here in the UV editor

Click the view tab and under the overlays. It's a little bit hidden here

there's an option called stretching so we can enable the checkbox here for the stretching and

you will see a

Gradient from blue all the way to the red if there was some really strong stretch

And that's what UV mapping basically is all about

That's why we are creating these cuts because if some surface has too steep angles without proper cuts

That's where the stretching of the texture would occur

So we want to eliminate that and you can see sometimes there are these

Slight stretches there, but right now here. This is nothing to worry about

So we can continue with the fingers, and we will use a similar method to unwrap the fingers as with the thumb

So let me rotate this and we'll start right here

let me switch to the edge select by pressing 2 and we'll start right here and

Continue over these loops and then include

these edges as well and

By holding shift we can add

Those others as well

Okay, so this will be edges. We need to mark a seam so press U mark seam

And

Now if we

Hover over those and select them with L as linked and let me select this all over here

So we can unwrap this whole part and check it out. So press U and

unwrap

You can see this looks much better than before than the smart UV project

These are much larger islands

And if you would for example need to do a tattoo over the arm or something you already know that

This UV island right here is for the arm

now let me do the rest of the body and

I already know that this here would need to be marked as a seam

Since there's quite a steep angle going on when the body changes into neck

So let me just mark these

three edges here

Mark as a seam and then I want to unwrap this part as a whole

for the body since I want to paint over that and

This will be visible all the time on the render

But even if you do another shots and rotate the model and something like that

There's smaller possibility that this side as well would be visible

So if there's a seam here, it wouldn't probably matter that much. So let's do one right there. So press U and mark seam

Right here. We can see we kind of separated this part all

Over up until here and now we need to continue down

So I will select this edge right here and continue all the way where the leg starts

so hold ctrl and click here and

Press U and mark seam. So now we are getting somewhere and we need to

Close this up somehow and the best way would be of course to do a cut around the leg

So let's alt click here. You will see we didn't get too far

it only selected two edges because there is a triangle here and

And there's a pole here as well. Pole is a vertex which has more than

Four edges coming to them. These are five so

Blender obviously don't know where the loop continues

So we'll have to do this manually by holding shift and clicking these edges right here

And up until here so we are basically separating the leg

Press U mark seam and now we'll need to separate this again

I would choose something in the back. So let's select this edge

That's part of the crotch and press U mark seam

So this way we basically created two islands for the body

if we go to the face select by pressing 3 and hovering over here and pressing L, this is the one part and

Here is the second part

And now to finish this up

we'll just need to unwrap the legs as well and

There is a little bit of a complication right here where we extruded the boots

So we'll need to account for that. But first

Let me just continue right from here. So select this edge continue all the way down here. So ctrl click here

Press U and mark seam. So no matter how many cuts how many seams we are gonna mark over here

We'll need this one as well, and we obviously need to separate this part as well

so press U and mark seam at the bottom there and

Now we'll probably just need to separate this ring here. So

Alt click here U mark seam and the inner one

right there

U and mark seam

so

This should be pretty much it

Our whole body is now marked for seams

So we can just select all right now and you can see the mess of a UVs that we made

But now if I press U and unwrap

It will take all of the seams into account and create these islands for us

There might be some larger stretches here and there

so for example

if I go to the face select

I'm surprised. This is not so stretch as I thought it would be so that's great

But I feel like here we have some stretch and that's mostly

because of this foot here, so

We can easily fix that by adding some seams there or you can separate the whole part here

mark it for seam and

And unwrapping it once again, so the stretch is still there, but it's not so strong or

You can make a cut let me go back you can make a cut right here

Let's check it out, so I will select all press U and unwrap you can see this is a little bit messy here

But there are no

stretches or only really subtle ones so it's

Up to you whether you want to do it or not. I really don't I will leave it like this

So let me just go back and unwrap this I won't be painting

the boots in any way so basically we don't need any UV maps there and

one more thing to mention

this

Model is now mirrored

We have a still the mirror modifier there of course if we rig the model later

We'll need to apply the mirror modifier, so we have the whole body shape

You might want to ask what will happen with the UVs when we apply the mirror modifier

They will just get mirrored so the UV map will still look the same

There would be just kind of a double vertices here. Let me show you what I mean

I will now tab out here and

Apply a mirror modifier for a second now tab back in you can see the UV map still looks the same

If I would select one of these vertices and move it away

You can see that there's another same UV island underneath

So that means when we apply the mirror modifier the UVs just got duplicated and mirrored

So if you use the texture

The same stuff that you would paint on one side would get projected on the other side as well

So that's just something to know when you are doing a symmetrical objects that sometimes you something you want to do

But in some cases even though the object is symmetrical the texture doesn't have to be like if you have a car

And there's a big racing number on the hood

that would

Not work with the symmetrical UVs, and you would need to separate that part and UV map it separately

This is a little bit out of the scope right now. We don't need to do that

I just wanted to mention if you model something in the future or if you're working on your own character

And you end up with the symmetrical UVs with the apply mirror modifier

You know what happened and what you need to do in order to fix it. So let me just press ctrl

Z to go back a few steps we can go in the edit mode check it out. Everything looks fine

So this is unwrapped and one more thing to mention when you do unwrapping you can expand

These options right here and increase the margin for the islands. You will see what this does

basically

That means how much of a space you want between

Those islands I can leave it as a default value here

So this is the UV mapping of the body we can tab out and enable the subdivision back again

Let me save the file don't forget to do that

and now I will hit the slash key on the numpad to exit the local view and

The next thing we want to unwrap are the feathers because they will be painted too a little bit

So let me just select one of these feathers doesn't really matter which one because there are linked duplicates

And now I will go into the edit mode. So tab in and

You will see some kind of mess like this

Only thing you need to do is to press U and unwrap since this is a very simple object

There is not much of a curvature happening there. There's no complexity. This is a planar object

So you will just get something like this in your UV view and that's completely okay

Satisfied with this. So let's save again tab out and for the mask

This is not longer a symmetrical object

We apply the mirror modifier before when we need to create these dents and stuff like that and for the mask

It doesn't really matter to me whether these islands are connected or not connected

This is more of a boxy object. Not that organic as a body

So here to save a little bit of the time

I will just go into the edit mode select all press U and choose smart UV project

Okay, and this is what we get

I'm totally okay with this, even though the side parts are separated from the front face

So if we maybe paint over this edge

We would see the seam there or something like that

but

It doesn't really matter to me right now

If you want this to be perfect, you can of course follow the techniques

I've shown you for the body and unwrap this mask yourself manually

Or you can take it as a little bit of a exercise yourself if you're able to create a nice UV maps

from some kind of objects using manual

seam marks and

Unwrapping like that. So whatever works for you, and I will now just tab out

Save the project and I will switch back to the layout view. So this is our

So this is our fully modeled shaman model UV unwrapped ready for painting