Tutorial: UV-Mapping

I've finally recorded my uv-mapping tutorial in english. It's done in tS6.6. Some users reported that it doesn't work with ts7 the same way, but there are still a couple of users who use 6.6.

Some UV-Basics:

Objects are 3 dimensional, textures 2 dimensional. That's where the problem starts. The software needs to know how and where to project the texture onto the surface of the object. That's where uv's come in to play. Why "UV"? It's like X, Y and Z for the object/world coordinate system. U and V represent the X and Y in the texture space. As textures are 2 dimensional, there's no need for the third dimension (W).

So by editing the uv-space of an object, you generally define a map of your faces to tell the software which faces of your object use which texture section. If you scale one face up to cover the whole uv-space, the whole texture will be projected onto it. If you scale it down to the lower left quarter, only the lower left quarter of the texture will be projected to that face.

The border of the object's uv space can't be visually seen in the tS uv mapping editor, but if you right click the white square widget in the editor, the view will be reset and the border of the editor window represents the border of the uv-space.
 

Some notes to the videos:

#The procedure described is for meshes that are to be mapped before you have a texture ready. That means you unwrap the mesh, and use the uv layout to paint a texture later. If you have the texture already, you would apply the texture first and adjust the uv's to the texture. If you follow the tutorial and get to know how it works, you'll also know how to do that.

#In the tutorial I'm coloring the mesh before mapping, to define which faces should get distinctive uv-space. For simple objects like the one in the tutorial, it might not be absolutely necessary. You simply can select the faces and go on. But if you accidently click a wrong button other something unexpected happens, it makes it very easy to select those faces again, using CTRL+"Select using freehand" tool.

#If you want to see ALL faces in mapping editor, open it with the whole object selected, NOT from point editor mode.

#I suck as narrator, and english is not my first language, so don't wonder.

Here's the tutorial: AVI file, Microsoft Windows Media 9 codec, 9 MB:


And a timelapse video, mapping another object, 2.6 MB



Last edited by GraySho; 02-22-2007 at 08:57 PM. 
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