UV Mapping Tutorial for CG TARDIS Builders

[rassilonsrod]

As promised. I just knocked this up quickly to demonstrate the idea, so I haven't spent a great deal of time getting the texture itself absolutely perfect - there are some black lines in it that result from the stretching... But just to give you an idea of the process.

I'm using Maya, but I think the principles should be more or less the same in Blender, Lightwave or Sketchup (But I don't know those apps).

So to start with, I have out a cube into the workspace.


The default UV for a cube (with 6 faces) looks like this.


I adjusted the cube to the the same thickness as the backing plywood and made it the same size as a panel.


Then I extruded all the parts to create the backing board and extruded the front battons out, and finally cut out the window and rejoined the geometry to remove any missing faces.


I then used the "Automatic UV Layout" function, which gave me this in the UV window. What you see here is everything packed into one square.
Each square can be used to help separate bits that you want to texture differently. But are essentially the same square that everythihg starts off with, in terms of applying a texture. If anyone has a better explanation of this please do chip in!


Anyway, from here I selected the different bits and attached the local faces into something I can paint on later.
I put the back board into the UV space to the left and the main part to the main square. I attach the adjacent parts so that
everything joins correctly.


You can also select two objects to make it easier to have just one texture image, and therefore save a bit of your computer's RAM a little.
For example, this next image is the UV layout for both of the doors from my Hartnell box. I made 2 images, front doors and back doors, despite
that the doors are actually 4 separate images.


Back to the Smith/Capaldi Box...

I load the UVs into Photoshop.


Then I label the layer and add a black backround on a different layer. I group them and lock the group.
The part towards the middle is the door and the panels to the left correspond to the panels in the correct order.
So the panels have the panel in the middle and the bits on the sides are the edges that join the front face of the battons.




Then I grabbed this from google...


And pasted it onto a new layer


Then I spent some time stretching the image to fit the UV (keeping everything on it's own layer). And I copied the
panel backs to their correct places on the left of the image. I normally copy some bits of the main door to surround
the panels on the left and use Photoshop's built in generative fill to fill in the gaps around the panel backs. But here
you can see the UV's which I have left in the image I made in photoshop.


Here I have brought the texture file into Maya. I selected the faces in the left hand square and just made them black

 

[rassilonsrod]

Here is a screencapture of the result inside Maya. (please watch on youtube for full quality).

 

[rassilonsrod]

And just to give an idea what is possible, this is my Hartnell TARDIS in Unreal Engine. I still need to finish the textures as there are a couple of problems in various places. But once all the UV mapping is done you can just swap everything easily out when it's updated.

The thing that was driving me nuts is that in the 60s they seemed to favour the TARDIS' right hand side (as you look from the front). For ages I only had one REALLY oblique angle of left side (from Galaxy 4), to work with. So oblique was the angle, that the corner post was hiding a lot of it.

Eventually I found another nice colourisation by Clayton Hickman on his Twitter page. But it's all a work in progress


(please watch on youtube for full quality).