How important are UV’s, off all the tutorials on UV’s there is no instruction on what to do with them once you got your image laid out? What happens after you do the UV stuff laid out properly, do you go into a paint program to paint directly on the UV’s like in photoshop, if that is the case, there is no instruction on how to get the UV’s over to photoshop, and back to the character built? Even if you get the UV to photoshop, what do you do with it there, I see on UV that are are squares with numbers on them, that has not been explained as what those number are for?
You have no need to worry about UVs unless:
- You intend to render or animate your ZBrush model in another program.
- Your computer is not powerful enough to handle meshes of a million polygons and greater.
UVs are what makes it possible to map a 2D texture to a 3D model. Think of how you would pin a 2D world map to a globe - you’d need some information as to what to pin where - well that’s what UVs do for 3D models.
So they are only necessary if you need texture maps (or displacement maps and so on). You only need texture maps if you are going to render your model in a different program - because polypainting won’t work outside ZBrush. You don’t need UVs for polypainting - but you do need to be able to work with meshes of one million polygons or more, otherwise there isn’t enough polygon density to support the polypaint detail.
So, that should help you decide whether you need them or not. If you do need them then I’ll try and give you some sources as to where you can read more. How you create them and what you do with them will depend very much on what you intend for your model.
Thanks Marcus, I understand that UV are for detail texture on an object that has places that are hard to get to. But what I was referring to was how to go about putting texture on the UV’s, that is hardly explained in books. I mainly want to use zbrush to do my figure modeling and then export it to Lightwave. To get around doing UV I plan to do sub-tools of different parts of my model and export them to lightwave, that way I can color or texture each of them seperately in lightwave. I do not plan to do detail magazine modeling of characters in zbrush or lightwave, as I mainly want to do simple animated cartoon figures, but would like to have different parts with texture or color. I guess if I want to color or texture of a plane, for instance, I would have to name each surface of the plane in lightwave to give it a different color or texture to get around doing UV’s. I hope I am not confusing the issue, but I will save your response on UVs…thanks