time for something a little bit more complicated

so my last post was of UVing a cube which is ridiculously easy

for my next test to develop my skills further i have gone for a stranger shape.




for this i was sure which type of UV to create, i was torn between automatic or spherical mapping. i asked Fahran, a guy on my course who i knew knew about UV mapping, he suggested automatic so i went along with his suggestion.

the initial map was pretty split.
it was time to use some of the tools in the UV texture editor panel.

there are 3 main tools i will be using throughout this unit which are:



move and sew the selected edges




Seperate the UVs along selected edge




unfold selected UVs

so here is what i got from automatic mapping



i will now use the 'move and sew' tool to connect as many of the edges so to have as little seems as possible.



the shape i used was just an altered cylinder and the top and bottom were still flat circles. i wasnt sure whether to connect each triangle segment to the main set of UVs because that would leave a large number of seems, but on the other hand if i kept them together then there would be one big seem going around the top edge of the shape.

so i went back and asked Fahran for his advice, he said just to leave it as a circle for now...it all depends on how it's being textured.

as you can see in the last image i posted the UVs are quite uneaven in places, and quite drastically in certain areas. so this is a good place to use the unfold tool. this helps to even out the UVs.




this is my finalised UV map for this shape. i applied a checkerboard texture to it to make sure the UVs were similar.
You do this so you can check that all the squares are as even as possible, if some are bigger than others then when the texture is applied it will stretch. It also helps with locating the seam of the object.



as you can see from mine all the squares are pretty even with no glaringly obvious different in their sizes, this means when a texture is applied it should be even all over.