INSIDE 3DS MAX® 7 [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Highlight Seams

Highlight Seams, available through the Unwrap UVW and UVW Map modifiers, can be more easily understood if you think of how a tailor-made dress is assembled. Two-dimensional fabric is laid flat on a table, cut according to a pattern, and then decorated with appliques, embroidery, or other embellishments. This fabric is then positioned and wrapped around a three-dimensional object (a dressmaker's dummy) to fit a person or mannequin. The fabric pieces are stitched together where one piece meets another.

In the 3D world, objects that are assembled for texturing are also "stitched" together. In 3ds max 7, this stitch is called the texture seam. Highlight Seams is a tool for making this task easier.

Let's take a look at an example of how to use Highlight Seams for a 3D sleeve. Since the sleeve is in the shape of a cylinder, when texturing it you should use Cylindrical mapping (Figure 3.1).

A typical sleeve is stitched from the armpit to the hand on the inner side, toward the body. This is to make the stitched seam less noticeable, and to hide the fact that the fabric pattern may not join perfectly along the seam. By the same token, in 3ds max 7 you can rotate the seam to the inside of the sleeve, making the seam line of the texture less noticeable. During the modeling stage of production, planning the texture seam to be placed where the camera does not see it will minimize visible distortions when the object is rendered.

Highlight Seams displays the texture seam in bright green on a Plane object with the Unwrap UVW modifier (Figure 3.2). Both Unwrap UVW and UVW Map allow you to see this texture seam.

What about other types of objects? Unlike a plane, which is an open object, a sphere is closed because it has no border edges. By default, its mapping type is Spherical, and its texture seam is a single straight line that runs from its north pole to its south pole, like line of longitude. If you create a sphere that has its default Spherical mapping coordinates and then apply the Unwrap UVW modifier to it, the texture seam is visible running from pole to pole. Any texture that sits on the top or bottom of the Sphere will be severely distorted (Figure 3.3).