Yeah
so you ve s are basically all the faces of the mesh laid out flat.
And that way we can use a texture to call our our mesh and wherever
the faces are that we've laid out flat we'll use that bit of the texture.
This will hopefully become clear as we work through creating the U. V. S.
And texture in the mesh.
And before diving into unwrapping our mesh I'd just like
to go through some fundamentals of working with U.
V. S. In blender. So let's just create a basic cylinder to experiment on.
And I'm gonna use the third layer.
Now I'm going to just click on the third layer
at the bottom just because it's a nice clean scene.
And then I'm gonna go shift s and then cursor to the center
just to reset the position there.
And then I'm going to go shift a and add in a mesh cylinder
and that should be fine. And this let's just call this UV tests.
Okay so I'm going to close out the tool shelves there with the T. Key and the N.
Key just to give us a little bit more space.
And then I'm going to tap into edit mode and then I'll just
add an extra edge loop just towards the bottom there with control.
Uh We don't need our reference image in the background here.
So I'm just gonna press X. Just to remove that
and all of our U. V. S. Will show up in here.
And in fact if I select everything with the a key
eggs E none of the standard objects come with UV.
So we're gonna actually need to build all of our U. V. S from scratch.
It's not too tricky to do. All we need to do is just press the U. Key.
And then that will bring up our UV. Mapping menu.
And then at the top here we can see we've got unwrap. So let's just give that a try.
And it kind of looks like blender is completely ignored us.
But if we just press t to bring up our tool
shelf you can see that we've got at the bottom here.
This unwrap. In fact
we can also do that with F. Six.
And you can see that we've definitely performed some kind of unwrap method.
So not a lot has happened.
And the reason for this is because blunder requires some
seems because otherwise it doesn't know exactly what you mean.
So if we actually just come into edge select mode with control tab and
then alt right click on this edge here we can say control E.
And then Marcus seem imagine this is using some
scissors to try and lay this out as flat.
It can now calculate how it might like to try and lay the whole
mesh now and flat knowing that it can actually cut down this line now.
So if we select everything with the A. Key again and then try that again with the U.
Key and then unwrap
we get a total mess because although it has
some information that it can cut down this line,
it's clearly not enough.
And in fact it's not too difficult.
We can just select this face at the top and then go control E.
And then mark that as a seam.
And now let's give that a try with the a key and then press you.
And then unwrap now and now things are starting to look a little bit cleaner.
If we just take a look at the bottom and repeat that kind of procedure.
So select the bottom face control E. And then Mark seem
and then try that again with selecting everything with
the A key and then you and then unwrap,
we can see we now get something looking a lot more reasonable.
So if we press F six we can come and take a look at the margin and we can
still tweak this if we want to kind of give a little bit more distance between the U.
V islands there.
So that's the first major thing to think about when unwrapping is where you want.
You?
Ve seems and if that sounds dancing because you're not
sure where you might want your seems at this stage.
There is another way we can begin to lay out our U. V. S.
And that's by using a smart UV project.
So first of all we can clear out our seems by going control E. And then clear Seems.
And then if we bring up our UV mapping menu again
with the U K we can see we have this option.
Smart UV project
and when we initiate that,
we've got some options to be able to pad the islands a little bit,
which I always like to give a little bit more padding there.
And then we've got this angle limit which is what will change the result of this tool.
The most basically this is going to control the amount of UV islands that we get.
A lower figure in here will give us a lot more islands,
but less distortion and a higher figure will give us fewer at U V islands,
but more distortion, meaning
The UVS won't quite match up in size with the
actual dimensions of those faces in the three d view.
So we'll then need to go in and fix that stretching, which we'll see in a moment.
So actually just going to set this down to something like 45
and then click OK.
And then you can see we have these islands that have been grouped for us.
Now, in fact,
let's just do that again by pressing you and then smart UV
project and then taking that right down to something like 20.
Just to see the effect of this.
And then you can see we're getting a lot more different islands there.
So let's try that again. And then in fact, let's take that up to something like 90.
Well, 89 is the maximum
and then click that again and then you can see we're getting
only three islands here but a much more distortion at the edges.
But that's okay. What we're gonna do is just try and correct this now.
So what we can do is we can come into edge select mode with control tab.
And then I'm going to just shift, select these two edges and then press V.
And then that's going to initiate a stitching command.
So at the bottom of the image editor we can see
in the head and we've got some helpful information here.
Now the main thing that I'm going to concentrate on
is which island I want to switch its the I.
Key which is gonna allow us to do that.
So if I pressed I we can invert which island is
getting moved basically what I'm going to leave that default.
And just press enter to confirm.
And then I'm going to just shift select these two here and press V.
And then press enter again. And then we can see we now have
these three major U. V. Islands.
Next I can come down to the movies menu and then say seems from islands.
And now it's going to create sort of roughly what we had before.
So we have seen going around the top two edges down
the side and then on the bottom face as well.
So if we select everything now and press you and then unwrap again.
You basically get something very similar to what we had before.
The next thing I'd like to talk about is a couple of helpful things we can
use to assist in our UV mapping to reduce things like stretching and to do that.
One thing that's going to help us is if we create a new
image and this is our new image dialog that we get for this,
I'm just gonna call this color grid for now.
I'm going to alter the color to be something like in
fact let's just set this to be something like 0.5.
Just something in the middle.
And for the size I'm gonna set this to 5 12 by 5 12.
And then the generated type is blank currently.
And I'm going to set this to be a color grid.
I want to do that. I can click on. Ok.
And then you can see we get this color grid in the background.
That's not looking particularly helpful over
here though because we can't see anything
if we was to go into textured mode with all T zero which
is just switching this view port shading mode to texture down here.
You can see everything goes black because we don't actually
have a lamp in our visible layer right now.
This is why I'd like to show another option that
we've got in the property sidebar with the N.
Key.
And then down in the shading area.
We can switch to textured solid mode with the zed key
first and then that will give us this extra option here.
The textured solid.
When we do that we can see whatever texture happens to be associated with its U. V. S.
In the view port.
And that means we can sort of bypass any harsh shadows
and general view port effects that we might have happening.
Which is obscuring a good look at our U. V. S. Basically.
So we can see in here that everything is
looking fairly undistorted and isn't flipped or anything.
Which is the benefit of being able to visualize this color grid on our object.
If we just select everything with the key we can see the actual U. V. S. Showing up.
And then we can press a to select everything in here and then we can sort of scale
them up and you can kind of see the effect that that's having in the view port.
Something else that we've got is another sidebar in the image editor.
That can be quite helpful
if we breast end in here. We've got a U. V. S.
Area and that's going to allow us to visualize any stretching in here.
So if they're just enable that that's currently set to angle.
So if we were to just grab one of these and start to move out.
You can see if that happened to be our U. V. S. We would very easily be able to catch.
There was some sort of error there based on the call,
a feedback that we're getting blue is perfectly fine
And the more that that's getting pushed into red
the more that that is going to become a problem.
We've all got the angle method of visualizing
there and we've also got the area method.
Now basically all this is referring to is if we
grab this face here and start to scale it down.
It's basically telling us that the difference
between area between these islands is an
issue based on the actual size of the geometry in the three D.
World.
So the more we scale that back up to be an accurate size,
the more that it should all settle back in a calming blue.
So I'm just gonna switch off the stretching information for now
and
let's take a look at a couple more things to do
with you these before we begin to one wrap our models,
there's two main ways to visualize and work with our U. V.
S in blunder and each behave and display slightly differently.
And this is the keep U. V. S.
And messed election in sync option which is this little button that
you can see down in the header here of the image editor.
So this option is disabled by default and I
encourage you to get used to the differences.
And this option is actually very helpful because as the name of it suggests,
it allows us to visualize which faces on the model belong to which faces in the U V map.
And currently we don't have this enabled.
And you can see that while we have this face selected in the U V map,
it's not really given us any clue as to what face that might be over in a three D view.
So if we just enable that, now,
you can see that we've got all of our faces selected as we needed when
we didn't have that option enabled to be able to see our U V s.
And now what we can do is we can switch to select face,
select mode and then say select this top face.
And now we can see that this is the face that this corresponds to in the U V map.
And similarly, if we're trying to track down something particularly on the sides,
this face here is turns out that it's this face over here in this UV island.
So let's just give ourselves a tiny bit more space.
Just expand out the image editors had a bar here
and with this option enabled,
it might be a little bit more intuitive as to
the way that this is working When we disable it.
You'll notice that we have actually got this option here
which is to do with the sticky selection mode.
So now you'll see that we've disabled it. The only bit of U V.
S that are showing up happened to be the face that we have selected in the view.
So this is kind of a way in which we can kind of isolate U. V. S.
And just work on particular areas.
But there's still another way in which we can do that with the mesh selection in sync.
So if we enable that and then press shift hey, h we can hide everything in our three D.
View and that's going to correspond to everything in the image editor as well.
In are you the editor?
And then we're gonna go all hate just to bring everything back.
So let's press a to de select everything and let's take a look at one more thing.
So if I go control tab and switch to
vertex select mode and just select that vertex here.
Currently mesh selection is in sync.
And if I try to start moving this particular selected vertex now you'll notice
that the corresponding vertex up on that top shell is actually moving as well.
So this is an instance where we might actually
like to disable the mesh selection being in sync
with what we're looking at there and then come
over to here select everything with the A key.
And then if we select this vertex here and start to move it around,
you can see we can just isolate essentially that one particular U.
V. If you like. Rather than moving its corresponding point on that shell.
If we wanted to change that behavior.
By the way,
we can actually come down to the sticky selection mode and
just swap it from being shared location to shared vertex.
And now when we select that vertex again,
you can see that it's kind of behaving like it did when the U. V. Selection was in sync.
Also another thing is you'll notice that we have vortices, edges,
faces and islands to be able to select in this mode.
But if we enable our mesh selection to be in sync,
you'll notice that we don't actually have the island selection anymore here.
We just got the vertex, edge and face.
So I think that should give us enough information to start unwrapping our model and
then we'll cover some more topics as we go in a more practical setting.