Hello. My name is Dan Silverman and I am the CEO of Master 3D Design, a graphics studio dedicated to creating real-time 3D content such as 3D models, skins, environments and textures. Not too long ago I was approached by Philip Staiger with Project Dogwaffle at thebest3d.com. He asked if I would be so kind as to write a tutorial on UV mapping in Modo (a fantastic Sub-D modeling application by Luxology) and then using PD Pro to paint the UV map for the model. This tutorial will attempt to cover the basics of UV mapping (for example, what is a UV map?), Modo's UV tools (particularly Modo's UV Unwrap tool) and ultimately getting the UV map into PD Pro so that it can be painted. I plan to divide the tutorial into three parts (creating the UV map, painting face/head and painting the rest of the model's Uvs). Each part should be published each week. With that in mind, let's get started!

Just what is a UV Map anyway?

That is a good question. Many people have no idea what a UV map is. Others have just enough knowledge of a UV map and of UV mapping to make them scared. I know that when I first started modeling I wanted nothing to do with UV mapping, but I quickly discovered that if I did not learn how to do it than all I would end up with would be dull, gray models. To keep it simple, a UV map is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional model. For a variety of reasons we cannot just paint on a 3D model. There needs to be 2D coordinates for each and every polygon that makes up a 3D model so that an image can be properly applied to it. The process of flattening out a 3D model in order to make it two-dimensional is what we call UV mapping.

In the past the process of creating the UV map was a time consuming and arduous task. UV mapping was the one task that most modelers hated to do. As time has progressed new UV mapping tools have been created and, in recent days, UV mapping has actually become relatively quick and ... dare I say it ... even fun! We will be looking at one such tool in Lucology's Modo called UV Unwrap. This tool alone has reduced my time of UV mapping down from an a few hours to anywhere around 15-30 minutes! As you can see, that is quite a savings in time. Let's fire up Modo and load our model into it.

This is the default startup UI for Modo. Modo's standard UI is great as it is, but the program allows you to totally customize it to suit your own particular needs. The model you see in the screen shot is an extremely low-poly model of about 870 polygons. It was chosen in order to make it easy for you to see the process that we will go through to create the UV map. I also chose this model because it helps me to describe some things that are particular to UV mapping models for real-time 3D environments like 3D games.