Heres the REFERENCE PIC of the gun in case you want it!
This first part of the tutorial is going to deal with a quick efficient way to UV map a weapon in BODYPAINT,
it may seem a bit daunting at first but after while you'll rip a gun to
bits in 15 minutes!! The concept behind it is to seperate each group
into front,back, sides, top and bottom then lay them out efficiently
and finally paint the skin itself, wanna know more? read on...
1. First off make your model, and as you can
see here its in several groups because it will later be animated for
in-game use, recoil and reloading etc, 1. Click the Layouts button 2.
and Choose BP UV EDIT to go into UV EDIT mode....and 3. Click here if
there is already a texture there to enable painting on it, if not I'll
be showing you how to create a new texture later...
OK we are gonna start with the barrel so
select it and 1. Click here to go into FACE MODE, 2. then choose the
SELECT TOOL, 3. RIGHT CLICK and choose SELECT POLYGON and 4. SELECT ALL
and this will select all the polys in the barrel group
1. Make sure the barrel is selected and 2.
Click the UV MAPPING tab and PROJECTION and choose BOX mapping and as
you can see its box mapped the barrel!!
1. Still in UV mode and using the SELECTION
TOOL and SHIFT to ADD to what faces are selected and CTRL to MINUS from
the currently selected faces, 2. We select all the end faces of the
barrel and the inner faces because they are all gonna be mapped from
the front.
1. Choose UV MAPPING and PROJECTION and 2.
Click FRONTAL, BUT before you do make sure 3. the FRONT VIEW is active
as marked, Frontal maps from the currently active views' angle even the
3d camera (USEFUL) 4. As you can see its a bit squashed so choose
NON-UNIFORM SCALE and stretch it horizontally a bit!
After arranging the top and sides a bit
better it seems they are flipped horizontally so 1. Choose UV MAPPING
and 2. UV COMMANDS and 3. select the faces and Click MIRROR U to flip
them!!
After flipping them to match 1. We move the
top over the bottom and 2. the Side over the other side now it needs
rotating by 90 degrees so click 3. TRANSFORM and 4. Type -90 degrees
and click APPLY...
Heres what we end up with 1. Top/bottom view 2. Front view and 3. Sides
view. After a bit of arrangment they are all nice and efficient,
wasting no space and its obvious which parts are which! This is the
basic principle, select and box map, move like parts over their equals
(flipping if needed) and use FRONTAL mapping from the appropriate view
and the SELECT, MOVE, SCALE tools as well to organize....Easy ;-)
Onto the main part, looks daunting but its
the same technique!! Ok 1. Select "main" and select all faces as before
and 2. Choose UV MAPPING AND PROJECTION and 3. choose BOX mapping and
as you can see it all gets laid out, it always needs a bit of tidying
up/organizing so thats what we do next...
1. Select the back faces (make sure you get em all because some get
mixed up in the box mapping) and 2. Choose UV MAPPING and PROJECTION
and 3. Make the front/back view active then 4. Click FRONTAL mapping
and as you can see the backward facing faces get mapped from the
front/back view.
1. As you can see the front faces of the
grip are overlapping the front faces of the gun so 2. Select the faces
to move and Click the MOVE TOOL and 3. Move em out from under to the
side as shown so it gets its own UV space.
Back to the side UV's and select one side ready for flipping....
1. Click UV MAPPING and UV COMMANDS and 2. Click MIRROR U as before and move it directly over the top of the other side.
Heres all the UV's after Moving/Scaling/Rotating etc 1. The Front faces
2. Top faces 3. Side faces 4. Front of the grip 5. Bottom faces and 6.
the back faces. The back faces are scaled up a bit because in-game you
will see the gun mainly from the back/side so they have a bit more UV
space! Easy wasn't it? ;-) Box map, Frontal map various bits,
move/scale/rotate to lay them out efficiently...
Onto the next part the recoil block thingy
on top, 1. Select all forward/backward facing faces 2. As seen here,
make sure 3. The front view is Active and 4. Choose UV MAPPING and
PROJECTION and 5. Click FRONTAL to map those faces
1. Make the SIDE VIEW Active and select the
side faces and again 2. Click UV MAPPING and PROJECTION and 3. FRONTAL
map the faces from that view. As you can see they are layed out as
well, Front, sides and top/bottom...
1. For the clip we can hide all the other
objects by double-clicking the top dots for each one and this hides
them in the viewports, 2. UV mMAPPING and PROJECTION and guess what? 3.
BOX mapping!!!
1. Select all the top faces after box
mapping, 2. UV MAPPING and PROJECTION, 3. Make the TOP VIEW active and
4. FRONTAL map it from the top view.
Here it is all layed out, 1. Top, 2.
front/back, 3. Sides and 4. Bottom face, 5. All done using frontal
mapping from the appropriate views!
Now we have to put all the UV's in the main
UV Space square, Only the UV's of the currently selected object show up
though ;-( one solution is to connect all the objects together then
they will all show up, but for this one we are using guesswork ;-)
basically all the main parts fit in the bottom half leaving 1. This
area blank which we place all the other parts in, switching between to
make sure none are overlapping!!
If there is no material click 1. FILE and 2.
NEW MATERIAL in the materials tab and this will create a new material,
who woulda thought it eh? ;-)
1. RIGHT CLICK and 2. Choose TEXTURE CHANNELS and 3. Choose COLOR...see next stage..
1. Make sure NEW TEXTURE is ticked, 2. Set
the width/height in this case 1024x1024 and 3. Pick a base colour!
Click OK and you have a new blank base image for the skin.
Now we need this material on each object so
1. Drag onto 2. "barrel" then HOLD CTRL and Click and drag this
material onto the next one down, etc until they all have the same
material, now its time to get painting, part 2 will be online very
soon!! Any questions on anything C4D related drop by my Forums in the
Cinema 4D section and I'd be happy to help!!