Secondly, as others have stated, the checkerboard pattern is useful for scale, ut also to make sure things that are straight in 3D space are correctly represented in your texture. ( Here is a good resource that shows some info on texel density including scripts to help control it.) I typically use a script to help with this when I'm building a complex environment.

Doing this across multiple models is trickier as Max doesn't provide dedicated tools for it. This is a very precise (and super fast) way to ensure even texel density across a single model. You can then repack by hand as necessary. If you choose to autopack your UVs at any point, 3DS Max will normalize your UVs to the same texel density for you during the pack. If you are only working with a single mesh, it's easier. We can keep the UV shells uniform in a number of ways but the simplest for a small scene or standalone portfolio piece is to use a checker map to visually compare your objects. When we speak of UV scaling and matching it, we are speaking of texel density. Although we can use any tile, be advised to stick to 0-1 for now until you learn more about why we might want to leave the 0-1 space.Īlso, an object with more complex geometry would require its unwrapped shapes to be scaled down so that they can all fit in the square, right? But then, a simpler object with the same material would have different scaling?Įssentially, yes. You can see the tiling if you load any texture on your model. By default a texture is constrained to the 0-1 space and simply tiles when outside of it. Mostly we use the 0-1 space to layout the UVs but we can also use any tiles outside of that too.

You might have guessed already but a UV grid is just a graph like you'd see in an algebra class except you can't see the numbers. How do you make sure all shapes have the same scale as each other?Ġ-1 is a good term for this area because it's accurate. I don't understand the placement of the unwrapped shapes on the '0-1 space' (I don't know if this is the right term for the checkerboard square). If it's quite complex, it might take me longer, but there are almost always ways to speed things up. These days, UVing something takes me at most an hour or two if it's complex. UV mapping is not so bad when you understand how to get the results you want.

Unwrap pro 3ds max