Modeling round objects is usually not too hard, but when it comes to efficient texturing, most people can spend hours on something that should take but a few minutes. For this tutorial I won’t go into where to find all settings and menus, as I expect you to have rudimentary knowledge of where to find things. This is just purely about process.
Tires are one of those objects most modelers and texturers seem to have trouble with. So let’s look at how to model and texture this quickly.

The tools we need of course are your favorite modeling package (I prefer 3ds max for that so my explanations with tools will use that, but the principle is perfectly applicable to other tools), the edit poly tool, the UVW Map and Unwrap UV tool. So let’s get going:
Initial Setup and Modeling:
- The first thing we build is a cylinder. Keep the resolution low, we can always mesh smooth later. Set is height segments to 1 and give it a 1 cap division and 16 corners.

- Set it’s size to look like the dimensions of a tire, bets you grab yourself some references for that.

- I now set up my face ID’s and make everything except the inner circle shape of my cap to ID 2. I do this because I will use a multi/sub-object texturing for this model later. It’s quicker at this stage to just grab your images and use them in max this way as it means I don’t have to bother with photoshop. If you like of course a decent texture can be built later on, but this if for rough and quick building.

- Add an edit poly modifier and use the face select tool to scale the inner cap segments (that’s why you want to have a cap subdivision of the ends of your cylinder) upwards so its edge can define the border between rims and tire rubber.

- Now use the inset and scale tools to build the inner shapes of the rim. If you use a reference, this should be quite easy.

- When you are done, use the edge loop select on that outer subdivision of your cylinder and scale it up, this will make your tire more rounded looking.

- We don’t have a good transition yet for the surface of our tire rubber to the side of the wheel. To fix this, again edge loop select the corner edge where cap meets side of cylinder and user the chamfer tool to break up this hard edge.

- If you used your reference well then you have almost a finished tire shape on one side of the cylinder.
- We want to work quick so lets apply a symmetry tool and mirror one side of the cylinder to the other side.

- Voila the rough mesh is done and we will go on texturing and make any adjustments later.
Texturing:
- For speed’s sake I just grabbed two images I liked from the web that will serve for now as my texture. We can adjust them later to look proper:


- I go ahead and delete the bottom of my cylinder as we won’t need it at all (save yourself some trouble as well).
- Next up I go back to my model and set up my UV’s. Channel 1 I use a planar projection, so select this surface ID and add your UVW Map onto it. For channel 2 I will use a cylindrical projection. Apply as usual buy selecting that ID and apply another UVW Map.

- Next we want to ensure our UVs are not stretched so much. I generally add a little checkerboard material onto it to help me quickly. Let’s do that and then use the UVW Map settings to help get proper mapping. You want to make sure at this stage to not get any stretching as much as possible. You will get some stretching that is unavoidable at this stage but don’t worry, everything goes through an ugly phase and we fix that in a moment.

- Add a Unwrap UVW and let’s adjust some of that stretching. Make sure your checkers are as good as possible square.





- I set up a multi/sub-object in my material editor next, using the wheel rim on channel 1 and the rubber surface in channel 2.

- Drop you multi/sub-object material onto your tire now.
- As you can see the positioning of our UV’s is not correct yet so go back to your Unwrap UVW and move your UV’s into the right place.

- When you done, we have a roughly unwrapped tire. Now we can adjust our texture to look proper and our mesh to fit the texture better and we are done. And If you really just want to have something super fast and don’t mind stretching, you can adjust your UV’s to just match our reference images we used.


Hope you enjoyed this little tutorial and modeling and texturing a tire or something like it becomes a breeze.
The final Image with a neater texture: I won’t leave you hanging cheaply.








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