Advance Unwrapping & Making Texture Atlases | Blender 2.81

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This shows my workflow for creating complex texture maps for my game sets. So all my models share the one map.
This example is for the game www.atlasempires.com which you can find more about if you follow the link.
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My website www.gabbitt.co.uk
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[@CStamper]

This is the most important type of video... because no other KZbinrs want to do them, but they're so important. I'd love to see more game optimizations and best practices!

[@grabbitt]

Thanks

[@thomasmaier7053]

This was great, exactly was I was looking for! An entire UV workflow, don't mind the longer format either. Also you can visualize stretching in the UV editor by going to Display->Advanced and ticking "Strech" - might help understanding for viewers new to UV streching.

[@grabbitt]

Thanks I could n't find it in 2.8. Would definitely have been very helpful

[@justchris846]

I asked him and Grant Abbitt literally came thru. Thankyou so much dude

[@grabbitt]

👍

[@tomasrovinaroquero859]

Thank you for sharing your workflow Grant. It was very informative.

[@stylizedart668]

Thanks for tutorial :) Im following you since i started 3D modeling and your tutorials are very helpful

[@JSAbbott]

Thank you so much! UV unwrapping has been the bane of my existence.

[@Axellent100]

These video's are doing the trick grant. Thank you.

[@lukas_g243]

This game is going to be awesome, I’m so excited for the competition btw!

[@grabbitt]

Nice 😃

[@leobardic5469]

Grant Abbitt when will game come out?

[@jeremytitus6575]

idk why but this is so satisfying to watch.

[@TihocanRiley]

Thank you so much ! I'm a beginner but your tutorial was still super interesting and I learned some things watching it.

[@philippmaluta978]

that's awesome, man! just what I needed

[@grabbitt]

nice :)

[@SirDMX]

Thank you for sharing your knowledge

[@grabbitt]

Thanks 😃

[@olaKochergina]

this video is the best there is on UV, thank you very much

[@DylanBurke]

Yes, baking! Thank you!

[@gower1973]

Tip for any beginners is if you plan to have any text or geometric patterns in your texture map, make sure the unwrapped UV’s are square/rectangular, otherwise they will be skewed and stretched. Especially important when sending a model to Substance Painter because in Painter it will look correct but when you export it back out it will be messed up.

[@grabbitt]

thanks for the info

[@Forkbird]

Great video Grant! Can't wait for the one about UV map linking :)

[@grabbitt]

do you mean baking?

[@Forkbird]

@@grabbitt That too, but you also mention something at the end of the video about redoing and joining the UV maps after accidentally UV unwrapping stones (kzbin.info/www/bejne/nYu1daqYfap1aZY&t=1063).

[@mustafayerebasmaz390]

You're are perfect!!!!! Thank you so much for your help. :)

[@peevee5588]

Great vid! Very helpfull!

[@derek9511]

Your voice is very relaxing lol

[@grabbitt]

Thanks :)

[@blenderforbeg]

very helpfull, thanks Grant Abbit

[@grabbitt]

Thanks :)

[@CapsVODS]

i love you XD haha thanks grant! Another great video!!!!!

[@333DOT.]

your mic is too good i feel like im getting asmr'd

[@gurgalof]

Yes do a baking video!

[@rustey222]

Great video

[@TerenceKearns]

2:50 I did not know about linked duplicates. Learned something already :) Thats a pretty big deal too!

[@TerenceKearns]

3:40 did not know about forward slash to isolate either LOL!

[@onjofilms]

I took a Blender UV course over on Udemy, and it wasn't as good at this. A++

[@opinci4343]

Amazing

[@grabbitt]

Thanks :)

[@dougieladd]

Nice

[@tajtajima]

Hey great video, thank you for it! I have a question, why not use conformal unnwrap method for every unwrap? As you mentioned, it generates better islands with less stretched UVs, so got me wondering.

[@grabbitt]

it doesn't always work as you might think :)

[@assasssin5328]

Thanks for tutorial! Is it possible to do the same thing with normal or roughness maps for instance?

[@grabbitt]

Yes

[@a3dadventure79]

hey Grant. Thanks again for all of your work and sharing this with us. at 18:59, sort of "sampling" the texture with the uv maps, this is definitely a really nice way to be creative with the textures, rather than it be strictly aligned a certain way. Do you have any advice of how to find these types of textures already made? Like a Master texture or a specific themed texture atlas. All the best

[@grabbitt]

Not that i know of but i've not searched a great deal

[@a3dadventure79]

@@grabbitt now my eyes will be open! oooh, let me sample that! 🙂

[@a3dadventure79]

@@grabbitt thanks again for all you do Grant. Because of you in a year i'm at a really good place with Blender. It works... it helps...get good at Blender! Getting to that point makes me love Blender even more!! haha!

[@dartfast]

You seem to have some wacky ngons on top of the mirrored cog and such? Is this simply because on a flat surface like that it doesn't matter and it'll be turned into tris anyway?

[@grabbitt]

exactly that :)

[@julesmartin6972]

is there a reason to leave in some ngons such as the rocks and the cogwheel? is it ok since these surfaces are flat?

[@grabbitt]

exactly

[@justchris846]

Grant Abbitt. I’m going to donate to your patreon. I’ve never had a popular KZbinr actually respond to my requests like you did. I do in fact appreciate it quite a bit, when you have time, would it be too much trouble to ask for a video on the topic of blender: a fresh download, how to set it up for easy work, and how to export from blender to Unreal Engine? If not it’s cool, there’s other tutorials out there, but you do go in depth and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one that needs to know how to do those things!!

[@grabbitt]

thanks very much. I dont use unreal much but i am releasing a video today about the very basics of blender to unity which is much the same. I plan to look more at unreal in the future though :)

[@justchris846]

Grant Abbitt , Thankyou for your response. I really do appreciate your patience

[@deltathelegend8526]

Grant Abbitt make a video on how we can make gun that shoots bullets in blender 2.8 because everybody want that tutorial from you

[@bertrand5115]

Hi Grant, first thank you for the nice tuto, your way of explaining is great. It would have been nice to see you go a little further, what precislely do when we have set all our UV (making the texture and then assigning it to all object).

[@grabbitt]

i'm not quite understanding the question

[@bertrand5115]

@@grabbitt Sorry for that, i would have love to see the next steps after you have unwrapped all the object, like creating the material (settings) and how to assign this material to all objects (right now i assign the material one object by one, but i guess you have another way of doing it). Thank's for your reply and keep it up !

[@deva_69]

Hey there!! Thought you just Uploaded....

[@loopedambiente9735]

Hi Grant - did you ever make the video on appended objects that were already textured (like you mentioned on 17min45secs in the video above?) I searched through your videos and couldn´t find it - but maybe I´m just blind. ;) I actually do have exactly the same problem: I´d like to make a texture atlas with three different objects. One of those objects was made in a separate file and is already textured. I tried to put them all together on one image but of course, that didn´t work so well. So if you have another video on this topic, I´d love to watch it. Thanks for the great work and inspiration!

[@loopedambiente9735]

found it! I think. :)

[@LaszloIvanyi]

When I import to UE, sometimes I get an error that x object has "overlapping UVs". I'm not sure if that's because the object faces are overlapping on the UV map or something else like the object ingame is overlapping with some other object? Technically if you unwrap an island and just position it over another island that should be fine right? The other error I got with all my models is that "not smoothing group" is assigned to them. I know that previous Blender FBX export had an option to assign smoothing group the "faces" but it is missing from my current version (2.8) Do you perhaps know how to set that in the new blender?

[@grabbitt]

overlapping uv's can be ok but not on painted objects

[@grabbitt]

not sure about the other aspects of the fbx export though

[@Master_KayOz]

UE4 can work with overlapping UV-shells for texture display, but it can't use them for baked lighting (eg. the cog from the video would receive shadows in the front due to the same texture space being used in the back) so UE informs you that, in order to use baked lighting it needs a secondary UV-set with unique UVs (meaning every face has its own space) and offers to generate such. Beware that these generated secondary UV-sets can be suboptimal, so if you want this done optimally, make a secondary UV-set by hand in Blender (or equivalent). EDIT: Oh, the "overlapping UVs"-message also comes up if the island-margins are too low. Light baking needs several pixels of "working space" around every shell.

[@Master_KayOz]

About smoothing groups: don't know about 2.8 but in 2.81 you can go to the right side of the export window and under "Geometry" you can set "Smoothing" to "Face" (and since I usually export for use in UE with tangent space normal maps, I also tick "Tangent Space" but I'm not sure if it makes much of a difference besides telling you that you forgot to cleanup some ngons if so.

[@lenstobrush7266]

Hi Grant thanks for the tutorial. I have just created a 3d model in Blender of an old Forge that is made up of 340 parts. I have just painstakingly named, UV unwrapped and created individual materials for each piece. I now wish to export everything over to Substance painter for texturing etc. However I am starting to learn from various social media platforms that I have over done it somewhat (understatement of the year) could you show me how to organise large amounts of Models and their UVs so that I have one UV for all stone, wood, walls, brick, metal etc. Also in this tutorial when you pack the UVs in to one Atlas how do you manage the direction of the texture? For example if you want the grain of wood going along the z axis (top to bottom) but because of how its packed its going along the x axis (left to right) maybe even you have a curved bit of wood and you need the grain to follow the bounds, how do you manage all this in one big atlas?

[@grabbitt]

It's tough to explain. Maybe I'll do a video at some point

[@lenstobrush7266]

@@grabbitt Thanks Grant! 👍🏻

[@petertremblay3725]

Do yourself a favor Grant and use Follow Active Quads since you will have a cleaner UV layout with more space and it is going to be easier to texture. There is also an addon that do better job than Follow Active Quads and it's call UV square.

[@grabbitt]

I'll look out for the addon. I generally don't have to worry too much about the unwrap when painting but it would be helpful if i had to edit the textures in photoshop perhaps.

[@petertremblay3725]

@@grabbitt Indeed and you gain more space on UV atlas.

[@MrGyan]

i have similar type of objects in my seen ..i wat to link yhe data but when I apply Link data all objects are rotated according to the active object..please help..

[@grabbitt]

not sure what you mean sorry. maybe set the rotation with ctrl a

[@MrGyan]

@@grabbitt I have similar type of object and I want to link together.but when I link the object (ctrl+a>link data) all obj rotated

[@mykalimba]

The PB in PBR doesn't stand for Picture-Based. Not that you actually said this, but it was somewhat implied at 0:30.

[@grabbitt]

Well I did not mean to imply that

[@mykalimba]

Yeah, I think my comment was more for others who might get confused. Unfortunate that "physically-based" and "picture-based" have the same acronym.

[@robahouston]

those ngons are freaking killing me.

[@grabbitt]

Why? Ngons are fine. They are all triangulated in game

[@fmmustafa]

Can you Make Video How can we Pack Udims Textures in Atlas in SIngle Big Image ,

[@grabbitt]

i'll look into it

[@umerkhalid6508]

please share linked object tutorial

[@hotbergina]

i had this problem i asked chat gpt : [ Hey ! I exported a metahuman, created clothes on marvelous designer, put them in blender, put textures on the alembic, everything is ok. But, now i have to import the clothes alembic animation in my scene in unreal, ok, but it does not recognizes textures (which is normal i think). The issue is that in blender i put differents textures on differents parts of the clothes [on edit mode selection] (pants, tee shirt etc...) and using blender kit materials. So i have many materials on my alembic, not one. How to import these all and fit well ? because on unreal, alembic can only take on consideration ONE material i think, for the whole clothing. The dream can be to connect all the blender textures into one and then export this texture with metalness etc on unreal.... THANK YOU ] and i think your video will help me to achieve this !

[@syedrizvi6408]

Is this tutorial is about, how to see all the faces in 2 D scene? Like if we take a cardboard and cut it in such a way they later we can join to make a 3 D object. I still need to understand why this is called UV, and what is the significance of the word UV?

[@grabbitt]

yes so mapping a 2d image to a 3d object. Like a cardboard box yes

[@Master_KayOz]

In a classical 2D-graph you work with the X- &Y-axes in order to display positions in 2D-space. Since in 3D-modeling we already use the X-, Y- & Z-axes to display positions in 3D-space, we use the letters U & V for the 2D-graph in order to avoid confusion.

[@syedrizvi6408]

@@Master_KayOz Thanks a lot. This is very helpful

[@Master_KayOz]

@@syedrizvi6408 Glad to help :)

[@Niko_3D]

Is there reason why you don't want to have too many Islands when unwrapping?

[@grabbitt]

Makes things a little easier

[@Niko_3D]

@@grabbitt It doesn't affect performance in any way does it? Btw I want to thank you for all these amazing tutorials! I have been following you since you had like 200 subs. I landed two freelance jobs few days ago, working on two indie games!

[@khaled.aldajani]

Can i just smart UV project and use Substance Painter to texture the model ? I really hate UV unwrapping

[@grabbitt]

Yes but you will see the seams

[@khaled.aldajani]

@@grabbittYou can't hide the seams if you paint over them ?

[@ghosttemplate1508]

I think if you use triplanar in substance work better

[@FlashySenap]

How to isolate in blender 2.8x seen older videos and it doesn't seem to exist in latest blender.

[@grabbitt]

Forward slash

[@FlashySenap]

Ah. Might need to change that. Using swedish keyboard you have to press shift and 7 to type it 😔

[@ezydenias8505]

I don't get how this thing has anything to o with atlasing, it is just how multiple objects share one uv and how blender can now do this in one step instead of many. But it is not like atlasing where I have already my uvs and textures and want to combine them.

[@grabbitt]

its a term used in many different ways

[@azbukaChisel]

name of the vid: Advance Unwrapping & Making Texture Atlases. where is Making Texture Atlases part??? all video is about unwraping..

[@grabbitt]

That's the most important part of a texture atlas. But it's an old video so probably needs an update

[@Anurag-hx4ln]

Sir can you teach in hindi

[@kesura7273]

bro unwrapping is the most i cant learn i dont understand even someone explain

[@grabbitt]

see my unwrap play list

[@jamarch3982]

Now what about unwrapping a model with 2,000 faces? Will you check all of those? Now what about faces that overlap no matter what you do? Now what about faces that flip? Now what about stretching? What about packing islands? What about placing seams? I wish I could learn all this from a vid with ADVANCED in the title. But it's only unwrapping basic shapes. Thumbs down.

[@grabbitt]

I go through those things in other videos. It all depends on what you call advanced and it's difficult to please everyone