Hey my name is Tiel and today I'm going to ask you how you make your UV maps...mm?

I am curious because it's the part that I always seem to lose interest when making an asset since it's so damned tedious. What type of mapping do you lot prefer? How much time on average do you spend unwrapping your models?

if you have xfire I can help you and explain.

Maniac gave me textools: http://www.renderhjs.net/textools/

Works for me and it's really easy to use.

I know how to make uv maps, I'd just like to see how other people do it.

Had textools a while back but it seems like most of the key features are already present in current Max by default.

Mostly simple quick planar maps and unfold mapping, then I adjust elements and weld them together nicely.
Putting together things that seems to need a continuous surface, on low angles, and cutting on material variations (not always).
And I use quick planar maps over small extruded pieces because they don't need high quality UVs.

Everything is done by hand, it's less boring if your object is subdivided in different objects.

I actually, need help with texturing cliffs, I really don't think that the UVW Map modifer, can do what I need. So the only other alternative is the Unwrap UVW modifer which I know how to use to make unwraps, but not for texturing high res cliffs.

I think cliffs can be unwrapped with pelt mapping and similar things, or tools.
they don't need to be super accurate. Just think that if you have a straight angle you don't need to unwrap it on the same piece of UV.

I had the idea recently to make crappy cliffs, make/edit a texture and make a displacement or parralax map to give the cliffs depth easily, then reduce the amounts of polygons. I didn't try to do it yet though, but I bet that would be far more effective than trying to make soething and match it with bitmaps...

The displacement map, technique is pretty old btw.

but who applies it ?

It's fun and intuitive to do, but trying to draw out the right kind of displacement map and getting it to look acceptable is hard.

Displacement blur tool is probably, my 2nd fav tool in 3ds.

Manually make your seams and use the relax by polygon tool. I use this like %99 of the time. Select every poly and hit quick planar map to get rid of Max's bad automatic seams and then select an edge and hit tools>break in the uvw map window to create a new seam.

Cliffs and other environmental stuff can be tedious to work on. The best way Ive found to do it is to flatten map it (defualt settings) and then stitch the pieces back together. Once you have done that you can make vertices planar on the top and bottom and adjust them how you need them too match up to the texture, and then also positioning the "interior" vertices in a proportional manner. At least for a horizontal tiling texture. Ones that tile in all 4 directions are much easier and you can just flatten map it then stitch it back together and just make sure the vertices are proportional to how they are in 3d space.

for other assets I generally use similar methods of flatten mapping, stitching back certain faces and trying to use up as much uv space as possible while keeping things proportional in texture resolution.

I've also used unwrella a couple times in the past on certain objects which has somewhat worked, although it dosen't do a very good job of using up the uv space efficiently as much as I'd like. But it does do the job, sometimes.

Thank you.