I wanted to take the time to do this Cinema 4D tutorial explaining the process for making a polygon object and then unwrapping the UV's and then outlining them so that we can clearly see how we want to texture our 3D object precisely. We will have the option of saving it to multiple formats but for the sake of ubiquity and layer control I am going to save our UV outline to a Photoshop .PSD format.

Below is a picture of our simple extruded object we want to unwrap:

Below is a picture of our unwrapped UV texture outlined for .PSD export:

Ok Let's get started. I'm not going to show you how to model this basic extruded cube because it is just that, basic. And it is not the scope of this tutorial. All I want to show is how to get the UV outlines to an external texture format.

Step 1.

Make sure your object has been converted to polygons. If not then make sure your object is selected and hit the letter "C" on your keyboard. This will convert your object to polygons or an editable mesh. The icon in the Object view should look like the image below. It's a triangle icon representing the editable mesh.

Step 2.

With this object selected go to WINDOW > LAYOUT > BP UV EDIT.

This is going to put you in the BodyPaint interface.

The interface should look like the picture below.

Step 3.

Click the Paint Setup Wizard Icon from the tool palette on the left side of your BP UV EDIT workspace. It looks like the image below.

Step 4.

Go through the entire Paint Setup Wizard screens. For the sake of this tutorial we are just going to use the defaults. So just keep going to the next screen until it says Finish.

The Wizard will look like the following set of pictures:

Notice after your done with the Wizard Setup that the material window in the bottom left of your workspace has been updated to now have each supported material layer for your texture. For example: Color, Luminance, Transparency, Reflection, Bump, Alpha, Specularity, Displacement, Diffusion and Normal. These will enable you to have control over each aspect of this material for each of the values. Making it nice and clean in your .PSD. Look at the picture below to see what this looks like in the Material Window.

Step 5.

Choose UV MESH > SHOW UV MESH from the top right UV Window. This will display the UV layout that the Paint Setup Wizard made for us. I'm sure in most cases you'll want to edit and modify the UV's but let's just keep this simple ok because that can end up getting more advanced than we have time for in this post.

It will look similar to the image below:

Step 6.

Next make sure you are in UV POLYGON EDIT MODE to make sure go to the tool palette on the left side of your workspace and click it. Look at the picture below to verify you did it correctly.

Next SELECT ALL by doing a (CONTROL + A  on Windows) or (APPLE + A on Mac) and it will select all of your polygons and UV's for this extruded object or custom mesh you made. You will know what exactly is selected because by default the selections are represented in yellow. Look over to your UV EDIT WINDOW and it should look like this:

Step 7.

Go to the TOP LEFT MENU OPTIONS and choose LAYER > OUTLINE POLYGONS

What this will do essentially is take your current selection and outline it. Thus giving you basically a drawn wireframe effect of your polygons. This is exactly what we want. This operation is what makes the outlines. Now one thing to note is the brush size for which the outlines are going to be painted. If they are too thick or too think make sure you use the keyboard key "[" for making the brush size smaller and keyboard key "]" for making the brush size larger. Also you can change the color of the outlines if you want. I use the default white since I am only using it as a garbage matte layer in Photoshop. It will look like the picture below:

Step 8.

We need to save out this texture as a file with our outlines in it. So go to FILE > SAVE TEXTURE AS.

Then choose your format. For this tutorial I am going to choose Photoshop (PSD) (*.psd) so I can make use of the layer system if I want to stack images for my color channel.

* NOTE Alternatively you can RIGHT CLICK each Material Type in the Material Layer Window and choose TEXTURE > SAVE TEXTURE AS. Look at the picture below:

NOTE: The default name of the texture you are saving for the color channel is called Mat_Color.psd  and each respective channel will be named in a similar naming convention regardless of the file type.

Step 9.

Edit and Modify your newly made .PSD file to have some texture edits to your liking. My example below has separate layers for each new texture area. This example is a very quick sloppy example of how you can throw your textures on separate layers and get your object textured.

Step 10.

Now this is very important. To see your Texture Modifications in Cinema 4D View ports you need to Open the Material Editor Window by DOUBLE CLICKING the Main Material Icon. If you look at the picture below you will see once we have loaded our layered .PSD texture that it is reflected in the Material Manager window. You can see how all the layers are organized in Cinema 4D just as they where in Photoshop. This is why we use layers.

To see your progressive Photoshop updates as you make them you need to keep reloading the image in the Material Editor for this object you are texturing. For each channel you are texturing you need to go to TEXTURE > RELOAD IMAGE Please reference the picture below. This will show you in the Cinema 4D viewports your newly textured object.

Step 11.

Render you object to see what the texture looks like. Perfect your texture as you need to and keep reloading it to get the updated view. Setup your lighting and whatever you need to see your object properly and the render it by clicking CONTROL + R. This will render the current view port.

Click this link: Cinema 4d UV Texture Sample Project >>  to download this entire tutorial project so that if you want mess with it you can. Like I said it's very basic and crude.

discuss this topic to forum