More UV Mapping Tips.

This blog post was originally written for Discord user Deputy Dropshot. Again this wont necessarily teach you everything for UV’s a lot of UV mapping is practice and experimenting til you find something that works for you. I will try to cover some things in here. In the near future I will be doing some video tutorials to help illustrate how I do my UV mapping on my object for now I hope this helps.

so first i started with a cube, In this part I will show how to weld together faces and make two edges seamless. Here you can see ive selected the top and front face of my cube.

In the texture editor you can go veiw > show selected (or simply press Shift+H) to show only your selected faces.

Now here you can see the two faces ive selected. the green portion shows connectivity (the edged where the polygons physically connect to one another) so I want these two faces to be welded together to make it seemless.

first select either all the points in the texture editor or the polygon face you want to rotate so match the other, if it is a perfect square or line you can usually just go tools > rotate by 90 and this will rotate it, otherwise youmay have to manually rotate.

once you rotate the two sides like above to match and face towards eachother simply enable snapping and manually move them together, this will weld the points together (note, if you can do it with the full poly selected move it close as you can and simply do it with individual points.) You can enable snapping by clicking the small square target looking icon next to the S/R/T buttons in the texture editor (or go snap > enable snapping)

once snapped together we can look at our cube and see how the new faces line up seamlessly.

now for rounded edges like a cylinder, although a texture projection does exist, you will notice a standard cylinder texture projection really deforms the texture on the top of the cylinder.

for something like this I like to simply select all the polygons on the rounded edge.

In the texture editor I then click the cylinder subprojection menu with those polygons selected and click best fit, this will make a projection just for those polygons while keeping the top faces as their own projection (assuming you used unique UV’s which is always reccomended)

this is what my finished projection looks like after clicking best fit, scaling the projection down a bit and moving it to the side.

now for something like a cone, the easiest way for me to do this is to make it a “top down” projection, this can be done with a planar projection.

first I select all the faces on the top side of my cone.

then in my texture editor I simply click the planar subprojection and set it to XZ object aligned, notice the nice circular top down shape in the middle.

I know not much detail has gone into this post. It is intended to give a small idea how to do a little bit of projections. again most of UV is going to be trial and error and just practice. pay attention to how your UV morphs your textures, itll help you understand how it affects your models for later.