Intro to UV Mapping

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Everything below represents notes for Sepha to finish the YouTube vid and article with.

The gateway to beautiful textures.

UV mapping is the second most powerful tool in your arsenal for creating amazing game art, right behind 3d modeling itself.

It is a method of converting your three dimensional mesh into a flat two dimensional space - and once we have done that, THEN we can create our 2D textures.

Put another way, it is a "Map" from the 3D XYZ space, into 2D UV space

  • U and V are used simply because the letters X and Y are often already in use by the 3d side of things, but they are completely analogous to X and Y coordinates in a 2D space.

It is also often called an Unwrap, or Unwrapping, because conceptionally we are unfolding our mesh from 3D down into a 2D flat surface.

An example UV Map. Taken from https://medium.com/@1008787/uv-mapping-8ca5b54bc14a with the Caption: "An example of the UV Mapping of a 3D model of a Knight β€” creator unknown, posted by Dominic Cerisano"

The flat shapes you see between the knights are the Unwrap (UV Map) itself.

We conceptualize this process as "unfolding" the object, like so:

Our goal will be to mark edges with "Seams" such that a pair of "Digital Scissors" can "snip" them open, which will naturally allow the shape to unfold.

Here, I have marked these "Seams" in red:

You can sort of imagine how that if this cube was made of a soft material like cloth, by "cutting" these seams here, it would naturally fall open and flatten into a cross like shape.

This is conceptually how I want you to picture this problem in your mind, as we get into unwrapping now:

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Everything below represents notes for Sepha to finish the YouTube vid and article with.

Actually make and upload a video showcasing the technique and tools.

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