Hello everybody!
I’m trying to learn basic UV mapping through the blender wiki. I’ve run into a problem when I’m supposed to map a planet to an icosphere. Unwrapping the icosphere worked just fine and I ended up with exactly the map shown in the guide, however when I import the image the map deforms as shown in the pictures. I suspect the solution is laughably simple, but I still can’t find it.
I think the squash is because the uv editor window is a square, and the positions of the uvs changed to match the rectangular image you loaded. Maybe 2 ways to do it - move the verts with ‘O’ proportional edit, or easier, save the uv layout with the uv editor script and open it in photoshop/gimp and line it up to the planet picture, and add pixels of space to convert the rectangle to a square, then reload it against your unwrap. I don’t mean to use the saved layout targa as an image, only as a ruler to guage how much to add to your picture. Or you could just convert it to a perfect square and manually line them up.
The wiki is the bomb-diggity!!
Just scale the uvs to match.
Go to the uv window and select all the points (A Key). Then scale them (S Key) and lock it so they only scale up and down, which is the Y coordinate (Y Key). Then you should be able to scale it by just moving the mouse. But to make it accurate you can lock the scaling to 0.1 intervals by holding CTRL, so do that and scale it 2.0 times on the Y axis. Then to get it back on the center of the uv window click on the menu right under the uv thing and click on UVs->Layout Clipped to Image Size, and then use G to move the vertices and they should snap to the center of the earth texture image. Then if you want you can unclick Layout Clipped to Image Size so you don’t forget and it doesnt cause problems. But that should be how you would do it…
OR
If that still doesnt line up correctly then select the two halves of the sphere separately (Draw a box to select, B Key) and move them (G Key) and scale them (S Key) to match up
Thanks for the answers. So this pretty much means that any image that I plan to use for UV mapping should be a perfect square, right? Or at least that would make it simpler?