UV Mapping - The Easy Way by Ziv Qual, Israel


Getting Started

OK, so you’ve got your model into DUV. lets first make some settings so we can see the stretches later on: Rightclick on the right viewport, wireframe/ uncheck the “show wireframe” and also check “material override” and uncheck “texture smoothing”.

Now you are set to begin. The first step you need to take is to apply a plannar map to the model:

Click “select / all” and then try “plannar 1” or “plannar 2”, one of them ususally finds the perfect planar map to start with, but if you wanna do it yourself, open the “Interactive” tab and use the interactive plane.



Getting Rid of the overlaps and seams

Unless you have an open mesh, you will always get overlaps from starting with plannar mapping. To get rid of the overlaps, we will use one of the more powerfull tools of DUV - “LIFT”. Lift will take all of the backfacing (the overlapping UV’s), flip them and place them to the right of the UV’s. Before you use it, make sure you rotate your UV’s using the “free transform” tools (under edit), so that you can determine where you want to place the seam you will get rid of (which will always be the right side of your UV’s, before clicking Lift).

By now, you allready got something that is good enough to texture, but why stop here if we can get rid of more seams and have better results?

The next step would be to select the “shared UV points” and “Join” them to get rid of more of the seams for easier texturing.

I’d reccomend bringing the (show) wireframes back for this step. Using the select tool, select all the shared points on one side (i’d recommend using the zoom and pan tools here to be precise), the selected shared points will turn pink on the other side. Now select the pink points on the other side (this will require much less precision because points join only when the 2 shared sides are selected). Make sure u do not select shared points that are not between the 2 chunks because that will cause unfixable problems later on.

Now hit “join” the seam is now gone be you end up with a very stretched part in the middle. It will be fixed next.