UV UNWRAPPING AND PAINTING Chakrit Watcharopas Reference: The Essential Blender: The Official Guide to 3D Creation with the Blender Open Source Suite Author Roland Hess Publisher No Starch Press Publication Date

 UV unwrapping is a process of assigning a set of 2D coordinates to all object vertices UV Unwrapping 2  Each XYZ vertex coordinate in 3D is mapped to UV coordinates in 2D

 UV / Image Editor is a tool for this UV setting  Normally, we’ll bring up 3D View and UV / Image Editor side by side UV Unwrapping (2) 3

 To unwrap UV of object automatically, select the object, go to Edit Mode, and press U-key  There are a number of UV automatic calculation methods  The simplest ones are "Project from View" and "Project from View (Bounds)" UV Calculation 4

 "Project from View" and "Project from View (Bounds)" take the mesh exactly as seen in the current 3D view, and squash it right into the UV Editor UV Unwrapping (2) 5

 Project from View can be good when creating a texture that corresponds closely to the profile shape of the mesh UV Unwrapping (3) 6

 Options Cylinder, Cube, and Sphere are good for unwrapping objects that closely match those primitives in shape  Sometimes, there can be areas that don't map quite correctly or show distortion  "Unwrap" is the most useful; it uses a procedure called "Least Squares Conformal Map" (LSCM) in conjunction with seams marked in Edit mode to give excellent results with very little effort UV Unwrapping (4) 7

 Seams are added by selecting edges, pressing Ctrl-E and choosing "Mark Seam“  Marked seams appear as heavy orange edges  Seams can be unmarked by selecting those edges, pressing Ctrl-E and choosing "Clear Seam" Seams 8

 In mesh Edit mode, hovering the mouse over an island of nodes in UV Editor and pressing the L-key will select the entire island  Realization: A single vertex from 3D mesh can have as many instances in the UV Editor as it has faces Selecting Nodes in the UV Editor 9

 Icon Sync UV and Mesh Selection allows all vertices in UV Editor that share a 3D mesh vertex are selected if any of these vertices is once selected Selecting Nodes in the UV Editor (2) 10

 Areas of unwrap that you are happy with can be frozen by "pinning"  Press P-key to pin selected vertices  Blender uses all pinned nodes as a starting point for the next attempt of unwrap  If Live Unwrap Transform is enabled, there is no need to re-unwrap your meshes after pins are adjusted  Turn off Live Unwrap so you don't accidentally move a pinned node and ruin your work Pinning and Live Unwrap Transform 11

 Blender's Painting Tools can be used to paint onto existing images or to create new ones, and can be used either in the UV/Image Editor or to paint directly within the 3D view  To be able to texture paint a model in the 3D view, the model needs to be unwrapped Paint Tools 12