I’m a newbie trying to learn about texturing and I’d like to know how you guys go about planning your UVs and other things.
My two recent attempts turned out badly but on the second one, I noticed one of my mistakes. A large part or division of my UV sometimes occupies just a small aspect of the total uv image and results in wavy lines. I’ve been pulling the vertices on the uv layout to correct this and this seems like unnecessary work + it results in a messy uv map.
What should I do to avoid this on my next attempt. What things should I take note of and what should I watch out for? Thanks.
Once you have unwrapped, you can scale / rotate / grab in the UV window. also, since you will mostly want to do this with UV islands, you can select a single node, and then hit ctrl L, and the rest of that island will be selected. Also, if you could provide a screenshot, we can give you better input.
Thanks. I’ve attached some screenshots. I’ve tried fixing it in the uv image editor but it’s difficult and the uv map gets messy. How do I go about it next time? Are there alternate texturing techniques that can be used?
the main problem is that your uv layout is really messy and overlaps. i would recommend some unwrapping tutorials or do a smart unwrap and use texture painting to paint the texture on which can give pretty good results when using such a texture.
that is a simple shape, so it should unwrap cleanly. make sure you don’t have any doubles ( select all in edit mode + remove doubles button ), make sure your normals are pointing out ( select all in edit mode + ctrl N ). however, if your mesh is intersecting itself, ctrl N will not work, so, if that is the case, you’ll have to do it on the individual pieces that make up the mesh seperately. another possible cause, is that the seams may not be placed well, or may not quite be connecting where they should. when placing seams, think of how you would skin an animal if you were a hunter. you make cuts in a way that the skin will lay out flat once you’ve removed it from the animal. anything that’s poking out, like a finger, you’ll want to make a seam along the base to isolate it from the other regions, and then one up the length, so it can unfold lengthwise.
@Kromar: The UV wasn’t like that in the beginning. It got messy when I was trying to fix the wavy lines. I’ve also tried looking for unwrapping and texturing tutorials but most of the articles i see are in video files which are too large forr my download speed while most of the articles are mere makings/show offs. Please, could you give me links to good tutorials?
@Modron: I’ve tried to do that many times but I mostly end up with crazy/haphazard looking uvs. I’m still not sure if the seams are the main problem because I know nothing about texturing. I just notice sometimes, a large face in the polygon’s uv is overlaying a tiny part of the image used as texture. This seems to be part of the problem and scaling the uv face in the uv editor seems to help but then, it breaks the flow of the texture and it gets messy like in the above.
