In pretty much every modeling software I use, on a 2-dimensional plane, X is the horizontal axis and Y is the vertical axis.
In Blender, it seems to be rotated 90 degrees. Am I doing something incorrectly? Can it be set up to follow these standards?
thanks!
Hi, @Turner! I think the ultra short answer is that different software follows different conventions. Blender developers at NaN choose this axis orientation back at the dawn of Blender time and they stuck with it.
That is my totally unsubstantiated guess of how and why, but if you are looking for the actual reason they chose those orientations, I’m just as clueless as you.
You need to rotate the UV mesh 90 deg in the UV window. And then resize it to fit from that angle.
Or from top view UV Unwrap > Project From View (bounds).
You might wanna have a look… for example here:
ahmetburul.medium.com :coordinate-systems-of-3d-applications-guide
( Additional previewImage: )
…or this
or that…
…or… 
Just to be clear, Its the same in blender with its 2d editor axes as you hoped. The horizontal axis is the x axis (red) and the y axis is the vertical one.(green)
Nothing to relearn in this regard. You just have your uv-map setup wrong and turned 90 degree as @Matakani said.
