ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

■ UVs in ZBrush 165

Automatic mapping has the benefit of speed and, in the case of ZBrush’s automatic
mapping solutions, efficiency, but automatic solutions also carry drawbacks. As Figure 5.4
shows, hand-laid UVs are easily human readable. You could open this map in Photoshop
and find the seams and the nose. The same map on AUV tiles is unreadable to anything but
a machine and impossible to fully edit in Photoshop (Figure 5.5).
ZBrush comes with several UV mapping methods. The three we’ll discuss here are
AUV, Group UV (GUV), and Packed UV (PUV) tiles. PUV tiles are the most efficient—they
assign the entire UV space to a character. They are not human readable.
GUV tiles are slightly more readable but not as efficient. When faced with a choice
between the three, always opt for PUV tiles (Figure 5.6).

Figure 5.4 Hand-laid texture map

Map by Ricardo Ariza

Figure 5.5 AUV texture map

PUV Tiles GUV Tiles

Figure 5.6 The same mesh with PUV and GUV tiles; notice how there is no wasted texture space
in a PUV tile map.