uv mapping woes

Support Materials and Textures
1

grump…l
Everytime I try to sit down and get serious about learning to use UV maps, I give up in frustration. Today I’ve spent the whole afternoon trying to just wrap a square rust image around a simple (uncapped) cylinder. Simple, right?
I have two problems trying to get UV mapping working. (Using 2.45)

  1. The image is pointing in the wrong direction. I tried it with a plain square 4-pt mesh.
    With a green UV axis mapped to Y,and a the red mapped to X, I would expect the image to be facing in the Z direction, but instead it’s facing in the -Z direction. No operations with mirroring, rotating, normal-flipping, etc fix the problem. The only thing that eventually worked was transforming the mesh by Z = -1. That made everything line up.
    Doesn’t work on a cylinder though because you can’t transform it that way. My cylinder then is stuck with the image on the inside. :frowning:

  2. Unwrapping to a simple cylinder should be a piece of cake, according to the tutorials. Not for me of course! Even when ‘sometimes’ the seam I place actually unwraps onto the side edge of my UV image, I sometimes get faces that are adjacent on my cylinder that are NOT on the map! If I start at the seam and highlight each seam in order, going around the cylinder, the sequence of faces on the uvmap should also highlight in sequence. but sometimes they will jump around. Having a harder time reproducing that so I think I’ve gottne the hand of knowning that the model view position is very important to the unwrap operation.

  3. What is the brain-dead way to do this? This just seems way too hard.

2

Relax and calm down. The next time you do it, it will take 1 minute (max).

You don’t need seams for a cylinder. View the cylinder dead on (e.g. in front view if it’s oriented along the z-axis), select the faces of the side. Unwrap “Cylinder from view”. Move the mouse over the UV-Editor, select all vertices, rotate them by 180 degrees (if the image is in the wrong orientation).

Select the faces of the caps, change to top view, unwrap from view.

HTH

3

Sometimes things get wrapped backwards. Click Uv, Mirror, X axis. It faces the right way afters.

4

thanks for the feedback. guys (girls?) It’s not that the problem is difficult but that it takes so damn long sometimes to figure out how Blender works. My problem had to do with that silent little ‘TexFace’ button and not noticing the ‘Texture Face’ and ‘UV Calculation’ panes hidden in the Meshtools panel, sigh.