UV mapping with blender

[WiseKran]

Is anyone around that has experiance with blender UV maps?

Every tutorial I find isnt specific enough to help me with complicated models.

I have this man here.

 and i wanted to UV map him.  But when i unwrap, it gives me a random mess of stuff that doesnt even slightly resemble the model, and i cant make heads or tails of.


and i see this.. and i say to myself... \"??\"


*edit*

hmm.. wheres jellywerker wen you need him

[JellyWerker]

here although this is cherppows specialtiy it seems

Did you mark seams for it? I forgot the hot key, so check the hotkey reference, but when you are in face (potato) mode, and you press tab, you go to a special edit mode, there you can mark seams, seams are where it cuts the uvmap to lay it out nice and neat.

For a character so simple though (as in he is kinda flat, but a cool start) you can just select all the faces on one side, then unwrap from view (Make sure you are in orthographic front view, that\'lld be numpad 5 and numpad 1 I think) then do ctrl-numpad 1, which gives you the reverse view, select thouse faces and do it again. In the uv map area, you\'ll have to arrange them and stitch one of the sides ot the other, to make it seamless.

A better way though would be to mark a seam on his head, around his arms, down his legs, and on the side of the foot. I\'ll talk to cherppow and maybe we can make a tut for this. It is rahter needed when you are trying to unwrap something more complex than a 12 poly candle (no offense cherppow, but you understand what I mean)

I\'ll try and find a tut though, as I know that will be rather hard to decipher.

Edit: I made a deom blend, I\'ll try and get the begginings of a tut written tommorow.

[Keyaz]

ps-mc.com has a groovy tutorial made by awesome Cherppow +9 of leet, available

hmm linketh!

[JellyWerker]

unfortunately that tutorial doesn\'t apply here, otherwise I would have linked, it is made for a simple few polygon object, while that piece has a few thousand. You can\'t simply hand select them and place them as with a simpler game object.

[Keyaz]

*shrugs* does one start at the top of the ladder when learning to climb?

start on the easy and build up, or use my method.

close your eyes click and hope ^^

[Wired_Crawler]

Good \"LCMS UV mapping\" video tutorial (applicable to more complicated meshes than hat) can be found  here, the last on the page.

[JellyWerker]

ah, I had forgotten about the tuts on blenders own site, yes, that is a good one for lscm unwrapping.

[WiseKran]

That model I made is made with subsurf\'s and smoothing, can you UV map a model like that?

Ive just started learning blender a bit ago, and thats the only type of modeling i know how to do.

If anyone knows some good sites for blender modelling, or places to learn, id be very appreciative :-)


Thanks for the UV map tut\'s, ill try to do them when i get a chance, and ill report here with my results :-)

[JellyWerker]

to uv map something liek that well, you need ot convert it to a mesh object. A good palce to search for tuts are the elysiun forums.

[Cherppow]

Hi,

Looks nice. I agree with JellyWerker that it\'s propably missing some seams. The hotkey is ctrl+e (in edit mode). There\'s pretty good tutorials at the Blender homepage. In addition to the tutorials, I personally find the Blender changelogs very informative. There you can find basic instructions of the recently added tools.

A good question about the UV and SubSurf. One can indeed UV map a subsurfaced model, just like any other model. With subsurfaced models, the UV mapping (like all editing) is done to the original model. the program automatically calculates the texture to the subsurfaced version. You can also change the subdiv level at any time, or disable it alltogether.
Smoothing doesn\'t affect the UV mapping process.



An example of smoothed, subsurfaced and UV mapped mesh. Original mesh is slightly modified 6 polygon cube.

-Edit-
To JellyWerker:

\"The essence of UV mapping\"

Thanks.

[JellyWerker]

hehe, that\'s good cherppow, very funny... /me goes off to have nightmares about horrible unwrapping jobs and overly complex models

[craftsavvy]

I found this to be very informative:

Unwrapping Suzanne
http://download.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/ch11s06.html

hmmm... as jellyworker said below... it is a little messed up, but after going back over it a time or two, I was able to figure it out.

I didn\'t realize at first, being novice to the program... I thought I was having trouble following the tutorial...lol. Still it was helpful.

[JellyWerker]

I heard that tut was messed up, but it does tell you the info you need.