I have just managed to work out how to place an image texture onto an irregular 2d plane. But now I need to take it one step further.
I have a plane (a long rectangle) which has been deformed using a curve around the z axis. Looking down along the z axis, the plane appears as a line with 90deg bend. I now want to stick my image texture onto the face of this plane, so it is visible when seen from the xy axis.
I believe my answer lies in the murky dark and uncharted world of UV unwrapping. Whilst there are hundreds of tuts on UV wrapping, they all seem to deal with spheres and cubes, I would like something which is applicable to my scenario, as I don’t think I need any seams or whatever.
Any pointers for a UV newbie? (Still using Blender 2.46)
I’ve been UV mapping for a couple years now, and it still blows my mind on a regular basis. But this is pretty simple.
A couple of ways (I’m assuming you’re using at least Blender 247, which has some major improvements in UV mapping. If you don’t have at least 246, I believe, go and get ya some of dat. The key is they’ve done away with the separate UV face selection mode and now you just do your work in Edit mode):
Rotate in edit mode to where you are looking straight at the surface you want to map. Hit A to select All. Hit U (or Mesh | Unwrap) and choose Project from View. Bring up the UV/Image editor in a window to one side, and play with it.
I would urge you to play with all the projections under the Unwrap dialog, to get a sense for what each of them do. It’s all strangely intuitive, once you get past the mind boggling unintuitiveness.
You’ll find that whatever you have selected in edit mode will be what shows up in the UV/Image Editor. But yet you can select subsets of your selection in there.
You really just need to jack with it endlessly, like the rest of this stuff. Personally, I also use Ultimate Unwrap (export obj to get from Blender to there, and back again). It’s got some really cool projections. But Blender has recently surpassed it for manual manipulation of the UV’s, imho.