Welcome to the new and improved Studio-Erebus tutorials!  This will be my first of a new series of tutorials dealing with both new, and previous topic matters ; however whether new or old it will be much more graphically intense, more detailed and hopefully the best you can find out there on the topics I cover.  You may have seen my previous work on PlanetQuake.com  under the "Quake Skin Tutorials" where I wrote with the online handle of Slaine. Same old me, but brand new site and tutorials.

To kick things off right I decided my first new tutorial would be covering one of the most requested topic matters that I've received which is "UVW Mapping"  or more to the point, in the very words many of you used "whats this unwrapping the faces thing you keep talking about?"

This is a step by step tutorial - very graphically heavy I took 41 screenshots in this tutorial. Low bandwidth connections please have patience - it is worth the wait.

Firstly I choose  gmax by Discreet to do this tutorial with because of the following factors:

• its free
• its commerical level  / fully professional product
• its has built-in support  to export to one of the most popularly modified games around being Quake 3
• it also has built-in support for exporint to quite a few other games with plans for more in the future

This doesn't mean what I explain here is not applicable to another program - in fact UVW maping is highly simliar in many other programs - if you learn how to do it in gmax you can probably figure out the steps in another program much easier.

First well talk about the toolbar found on the right hand side in gmax as it will be important to your navigating around:

The two buttons you will be using are the first and second buttons on the bar.   The first one is called the "Create" tab, the second is called the "Modify" tab.   As with almost any button in gmax if you hover your mouse over the button for a short time you will find it will come up with a pop up box telling you the name of that button.  Go ahead and try this - it will help you find buttons if you are unsure what I'm talking about.

Next - lets get started this is hands on!  I expect that you will want to do each step on your own as I outline it here - people often learn best by DOING so please DO this as we go along.

Pressing button 1 will get you to the Geometry creation panel.  

Pressing button 2 will create a Box

Setting the items in sectino 3  - Length, Width, and Height each to 100.00  will create a box with the same dimensions I am working on.  

The Green arrrow is here only for demonstration - to point out you can have the system automatically generate the UVW mapping coordinates.  However - this does not allow YOU control over it , and quite frequently you will have to do it by hand yourself later anyways - but on a rare occaison its actually usefull so I wanted you to know its there.

Now choose the Modify button at the top highlighted in yellow here:



Then choose from the Modify drop down list as shown here:



This will drop down a list , choose UVW Map



I have also boxed in the part that shows the sub-section that UVW Map is in  "UV Coordinate Modifiers" is in bold to help you more easily locate the area where UVW settings are stored.


Now the screen changes a bit: as seen below:



Put a dot in the selector for "Box" as seen above.

Then just a bit farther down choose the "fit" button. It may not strictly be neccesary in this instance - however many times you will find the default UVW "gizmo" as they like to call it in gmax may be too large or too small. Clicking on "fit" will automatically resize it to better fit along whichever Alignment button you have selected.  Usually I find any single one of them is enough to get it right but you can play with it to tweak it if you need to by doing it on each of the X, Y and Z axis.




Now once again - like before. We are going to choose from the "modifier list" drop down and this time choose Unwrap UVW.   The reason for this is it allows us to control the UVW map by hand much easier.

Now you will see another "modifier" in the stack - named suspiciously "Unwrap UVW"  - the same one I just had you choose!   Imagine that  ;)    Anywyas go ahead and click the little +  sign next to it. This will expand some sub optoins beneath it.




As promised you see below clicking that plus has revealed we have the option of "Select Face"   This is pretty usefull as you will see shortly  - and is the key to unwrapping! Go ahead and click on Select Face at this time.

Now you will need to go up to the very top menu bar and click on the "select object" button. This makes it so whatever you click on in the 3D editing window will be selected - but not moved. This is important as if you used the one that was "select and move" you may inadvertently mess up your model while your selecting all the faces and move it around without intending to.

Finally the end of page 1 ....... where the green arrow is  near the word "Perspective" you should RIGHT hand click your mouse and then from the drop down choose "Edged Faces" which will place a "check mark" in front of that option.  This helps you know where there are faces to click on or not.   While the example I have chosen here makes it extremely easy because its a box - when you do something like a humaoid character this can be invaluable so remember to turn it on by habit - eventually you may turn it off and on to get yourself different views as needed though.




Hopefully you've found that to be fairly simple.  What we've done so far is created a new object, added two "modifers" to it and set up our system to be ready to select faces, and easily see them.  Ready for more?   On to page two!