I would like to unwrap some faces that are inside my mesh but I can’t see them when I’m in UV unwrap mode? I cannot go into wireframe mode either. (My mesh is transparentso the interior faces will also be seen) I have tried preselecting them before going into UV face select mode and I see a mesh on the UV window corresponding to these faces’ vertices but it is not selected and I cannot make it be selected (pink) - all attempts to select get the exterior faces in this mode.
Can I make the exterior faces somehow invisible temporarily?
building on Soylent’s response, you can duplicate the mesh but not move it. For the duplicate, set the material z-offs to a small number, which will fake out Blender to place it slightly in back of the original. this would be the backside. make the frontside Alpha .5 so that the backside shows through, as you indicated you would like it to. Since you now have two meshes in the same place, you can UV map both independently.
Thanks for the replies so far but actually my faces are not backfaces - I spent a week of evenings discovering two-sided vs. double-sided etc. I am OK there finally.
In this case there is a separate internal structure which is visible because my exterior faces are mostly transparent - using a UV texture mapped to the alpha channel. (for example think of a box with a UV sphere inside - both in the same object mesh). If I put a material index on the interior faces (the sphere) I can see them rendered using the assigned material. However, I would now like to assign a separate UV texture to these internal structures but when I am in the UV face unwrap window I cannot see or select the faces because I can’t switch to wireframe mode. Even if I preselect them in edit mode then switch to UV face unwrap Blender seems to add the exterior faces to the selection so that unwrap affects other material indices.
I should probably make this internal structure a separate object - then problem solved - but I wondered if I could get around this UI issue?
just to be a little simpler, in UV Face Select mode, select the outside faces, and press H to Hide them. only the interior faces will then be visible. no need to leave and go into edit mode; Hiding, like Border select, works in all modes.
Thanks a lot to both of you. Hide is what I need. In edit mode I gather it is also on the specials menu (W) and so is the opposite Reveal. The specials menu is different in UV face select mode so I looked up the hotkeys at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Hot_Keys HKEY. Hide Selected. All selected vertices and faces are temporarily hidden.SHIFT+H. Hide Not Selected: All non-selected vertices and faces are temporarily hidden.ALT+H. Reveal. All temporarily hidden vertices and faces are drawn again.
Also RamboBaby’s solution works as well.