- Hey there in this tutorial/guide I will describe a method that might help you to speed up the process of new mod creature creation for impossible creatures (IC). This might help specifically with the texturing part's “Unwrapping UVW” process of your creature’s model.

- This guide assumes you have gone through my original guide and are somewhat familiar with the programs showcased in it, so I will just cut to the chase:
https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3051026290

- If you have already tried to follow my full guide on mod creature creation, you might have discovered that it is quite a tedious and a long process to unwrap your model for texturing, especially if your model’s whole topology (models patch count and relative placement) does not perfectly match to any of the available source models, and you can’t simply load the finished unwrapped UVW, you have to start the unwrapping from scratch.

- Even if your new creature differs by one extra patch from the available source model you still need to redo the unwrapping process.

- In IC a lot of creatures have very similar topology, if not the whole body, then at least most of their limbs, for example the horse and the wolf topology is actually perfectly equal, they have the same patch count and the same relative patch placement between them.

- Its just that the wolfs patches have been repositioned and resized to better resemble a horse, you can find this image in one of the original IC documents, where they demonstrate that originally the horse model was molded from a wolfs model. In this case you could simply load the wolfs UWS and use them for the horse, with no special actions:


- However, there is a way to get unwrapped UVW information for a specific part or limb of your mod creature from a donor creature with a limb that has the same topology, even if the rest of its body has a quite different topology.

- I made this guide separate from my original one mainly to avoid disturbing the flow of the first guide as much as possible.

- While its cool to create your own new original creature with your own original topology, sometimes its smarter to try and copy what the original IC developers did, at least for a few specific limbs of the creature. For example, pretty much for all creatures their legs consist of 7 segments.

- This guide assumes that you have two models one as donor and one as target and both of them have some topology similarities to take advantage of. Also it assumes that you unwrap UVW of all your creatures limbs to fit their texture maps in a somewhat similar manner, or at least you try to mimic the style of the original IC developers.

- This method can be applied to the model once you have its Multi-Material ready and you have assigned ID numbers to the creatures limbs.

- As an example, I will use my Centaur and Thylacine models, since some of their topology is similar, so they are perfect candidates to demonstrate this method.

- My thylacine (donor) model is finished and unwrapped, while my centaur’s 3D model is finished but remains untextured. In this tutorial I will try to apply the thylacines back leg UWV’s to the centaurs back legs:


- At the moment this is how both creatures back legs UWV's appear, thylacines is nice and laid out over its texture map, while the centaur creatures UWV is most likely way out of position and still a jumbled mess:

- The process begins with the donor file, have your creature model selected and go over to the Modify tab, if the creature model is finished its Modifier list usually should contain these 3 items “Editable Patch”, “Unwrap UVW” and “Boner”:


- Select the “Boner” modifier and in the command panel find and click the “Topology” button to enable the Topology sub-mode:


- Your creature should turn blue in your “User Smooth + Highlights” viewport.


- If it turns blue but there is some of its textured parts are partly visible just turn off and on the “Unwrap UVW” modifier buy clicking the little light-bulb icon:



-If it simply turns into a wireframe, like this, have “Edged Faces” option turned OFF in your viewport settings, by right clicking the viewports name:


- Moving forward, with the Topology sub-mode selected, an array of new buttons should appear at the bottom of the command panel (if nothing appeared, un-click and click the Topology button again):


- First toggle the “Choose Patches” option:


- Since we are going to get the UVW information for the back legs while in this “Choose Patches” mode we need to select all of one of its legs patches. The selected patches will turn red:


- It can be somewhat challenging to select only the patches you want but you can use “Ctrl” key to select the patches one at a time, and “Alt” key to de-select the patches you selected by accident. Also you can rotate your view around to get a better angle at the limb selection.

- All of the patches must be connected between themselves, for example if you try to save UV Coords of both legs at the same time like this, you will get an error:


- However, if you select patches this way, they do connect and you will be able to save the UV Coords for both legs at the same time. However, the way patches transition from one leg to the other might not always be this simple for your intended creature as well, that’s why I am demonstrating this process for both legs separately:


- Now with your leg patches selected as your second action in the command panel switch to “Choose Anchor Patch” mode:


- And pick one of the legs patches, your cursor should turn to “plus” icon to indicate you can select a patch. In this mode it a bit weird and glitchy to try and select the particular patch you want, but with enough clicks and with some view rotation it can be done. Its as if the patches are offset from their real positions somehow:


- The selected patch will turn grey. The main thing is that you remember the patch you picked, and you will be able to find its equivalent on your target creature.

- The third step is optional. If you wish you can select the “Choose Anchor Edge” mode:


- An pick one of the edges located on the patch you just picked, you can also leave the one selected by default, again the important thing is that the same edge is selected on the target creature once you load the UV Coords (The selected edge will be colored white):


-Now the fourth step is to click “Save UV Coords”:


- And save a “.UVF” file where you will be able to later find it:


-Now you can repeat the same process for any other limb you might wish to apply to your target creature, in my case the left leg. As before: Select the patches -> Select the Anchor patch/edge -> "Save UV Coords":


- Now with the "UV Coords" saved for all desired limbs, we can open our target creature model.

- Before you start you should save a separate backup file of your creature, since the following actions will mainly focus on exporting another set of UWV files which you will later on load and apply to your actual model.

- First things first you must have your multi-material applied to your creature (even if your textures are at unfinished draft stage at the moment). Otherwise, the gmax will crash when using the Boner modifier:


-If you just finished your 3D model and set up its material ID numbers, most likely the only modifier in the Modifier list will be “Editable Patch”:


- Go ahead and add the “Boner” modifier


- Sometimes you also need to add "Unwrap UWV" modifier before you add the "Boner" modifier to avoid crashing, just select all the patches in the "Editable patch" modifier and add "Unwrap UWV" modifier, then follow it up with "Boner" modifier, and go from here (if it crashes without it).


-Now as before we go to the “Topology” sub-mode:


-And we set up our target limb the same way we did with our donor:
“Choose Patches” -> ”Choose Anchor Patch” -> “Choose Anchor Edge”:


- Now at first glance the centaur leg might not look like our donor creatures leg at all, but topologically speaking they are one and the same, and the frontal patch at the bottom of the leg is in the same spot – again topologically speaking.

- With your leg prepared this time click the “Load UV Coords” and find your file:


- It might look like nothing happened, but just switch to any other of the “Boner” modifiers sub-modes for example “Bone” and you might see the changes reflected on your model:


- Nice - now our rear right leg has been unwrapped the same way thylacine's leg was, only there is one small issue… the rest of creatures UVW is set to a single vertex, and all of the material ID’s except for the leg has beet reset to 1.

-That’s okay, remember I said you should make a backup! After we extract the particular UVW information from this version of our creature file, we can trash it. Yes this method is starting to seem pretty janky and convoluted, but this was the only way I was able to achieve the intended result.

- Now to extract the useful UVW information we need to add 2 more modifiers to the Modifier list, and these modifiers must be on top of the current boner modifier.

- First add “Patch Select” modifier:


- And we select all of the patches of our target leg. As a matter of fact while the rest of the models material ID’s are nuked, we can still select our particular leg using the "Patch select" modifiers “Select by Material ID” option (in my case the back legs ID was 6):


- Then with the patches selected we add the second modifier “Unwrap UVW”:


- At this point you can actually inspect how the UVW appears laid over your texture, by clicking the “Edit…” button in the “Unwrap UVW” modifier and picking the correct Map (as you can see it looks just like thylacine’s leg we saw at the beginning):


- But what we actually want to do in this modifier, is we want to click the “Save…” button to save the UWV information of the right leg (this file is a bit different from the one we loaded in beforehand) keep this file somewhere you will find it later on:


- Now you might ask - couldn’t you just use “Save…” option from the Thylacines “Unwrap UWV” modifier and skip all the Boner modifier stuff? No – unfortunately that’s not how that works, using this option the program looks at the model as a whole instead only at the specifically selected red patches we picked in the “Boner” modifier for both models.

- Now we can move on to other limbs we might want to texture, in my case the left rear leg. In the process we will discard all the work we did for the right leg, since we already got what we wanted, our “.UVW” file.

- Simply delete the 2 last modifiers we added and repeat the same process for the other limb:


- Choose Patches ->Anchor Patch -> Anchor Edge -> Load UV Coords
“Patch select modifier” and “Unwrap UWV” modifier:


- And as before save the left legs UWV information:


- And now we have UVW information files for both legs:


- At this point if we have extracted/saved UVW information files for all the limbs we had planned, we can trash the target creatures file we just used and restore our backup and open it up to apply the UVW information for real.

- Open the “real” model file, select it and as before apply its Multi-material:


- And now it is time to apply the saved “.UWV” files

- Add “Patch Select” modifier select the appropriate patches followed by “Unwrap UWV” modifier, for each leg separately, and use “Load…” option to find your saved UWV files and apply them to the model:


-And here is the end result, now you can further adjust the vertex placement so they better fit your model and your texture map:


- Now if you wish to control the vertex placement for both legs at the same time, right click the “Modifier list” field and click “Collapse All” this will apply all the modifiers from the list to the patch model and remove them from the list:


- Then add “Patch select” and “Unwrap UWV” again, this time selecting both leg patches in the “Patch select" modifier:


-And that’s it, we avoided some unwrapping work that was already done on another creature model and at this point you can continue unwrapping the rest of your model the good old way.

-A few closing thoughts on this method.

- While this method is somewhat convoluted, I feel like it is more cost effective time wise, compared to the process of unwrapping the same 7 segment leg over and over again, especially if you plan on creating a rather large quantity of mod creature models.

- In fact these parts colored red for these two creatures topology wise are one and the same, so in reality I could have used this method for this whole part in one go, and saved a lot of unwrapping time, with some slight adjustments to the UVW vertices to better fit the Centaurs texture maps:


- This method can also be used even if the limbs between the two creatures don’t match perfectly, you can still load its UVW at least partially.

-For example the upper part of the back leg is one and the same between T-rex and Centaur models from the topology point of view. Because as far as the program is concerned these two parts I have shown here are simply 6 segment long square tubes once you select them trough the Topology sub-mode:
“What we see”:

“What the program sees” (yes I posted the same image twice to try to illustrate my point):


- Once you load most of the pre-unwrapped limb, you can follow it up by selecting the few remaining patches that didnt match with donor and unwrap them the usual way.

- Unfortunately some glitches can happen while using this method. While the patch placement is correct, sometimes some patches orientation can become flipped, so you might need to do some minor additional adjustments in the "Unwrap UVW" modifier:


-For example this happened to one of the leg patches at the bottom, so I simply fixed it myself, broke the vertices off:


- flipped them, and re-weled back thogether to restore the unwrapped leg:



- If you gave the IC creature modding a shot and considered the UWV unwrapping just as annoying and dull as I did I hope you found this useful to speed up your modding process.