Unwrapping the model

Setup

The first step in the unwrap process is to ensure that images drawn onto the model will be correctly stretched and not distorted.

Apply the unwrap help texture to the model
To ensure that you have dealt with every face has been unwrapped move everything outside the square where they were to the left. As you work, and complete pieces move them to the left of the square
Once the initial pile is gone, you will know that you are done.
Show the texture in the editor

Going through the model piece by piece, select a set of related faces and unwrap it

select the faces you want to unwrap, they should be related (top of platform, the sign post etc.)
start by applying a projection (there are other methods... if you had more organic shapes, this may not be the best way of doing this but for our purposes good enough). Doing this will detach the edge vertices also which is handy.
- If you skip this step you might find that moving your selected faces could involve addtional edges and vertices not moving.. to fix it, do a detach edge vertices from the tools menu before moving the faces
Use either the horizontal or vertical scale button to stretch the face so that the texture isn't stretched (you are aiming for coloured squares if using the unwrap helper. If they are rectangles then the image is stretched). If you can't see if its a square, do a uniform scale on the faces so that it is really big then fix the stretch
If the face is piece that shares textures with another, perform a copy and then paste onto a duplicate set of faces (you have to select copy/paste from the uv editor edit menu, typical ctrl-c/ctrl-v short cuts do not work!)

These are the things to consider during the unwrap process

stack faces that will share the same texture
look at the numbers... make sure they aren't backwards. This is especially important faces that will have writing on it because the writing will be backwards
if a set of faces have the same shape but the triangles are configured differently you can still place them on top of each other (if you want the texture to be the same). Once they are, you can align the shapes by going through each of the vertices and using both the vertical and horizontal vertex alignment buttons
Be neat when stacking faces, use the vertex alignment buttons to align vertices so that faces are exactly on top of each other.

Last updated 4 years ago