Blender for Virtual Worlds

Beginning Blender – Unwrap & Texture

The Process

The steps for unwrapping an object are:

  1. Open your UV/Image Edit area
  2. Select Edges and Mark Seams (Control E)
  3. Select All
  4. Press U key (Choose Unwrap, Smart UV Project, or one of the other choices.)
  5. Repeat and tweak the above until you get a layout you can work with

Once the object is unwrapped, there are 4 possible methods to put a texture on it:

  1. Export the UV Layout and paint on it in Gimp or Photoshop or
  2. Open a texture in your UV/Image Edit Area (usually seamless texture)  or
  3. Paint directly on the texture using Texture Paint or Vertex Paint or
  4. Use Materials, Textures, and Bake (in either Blender Render or Cycles.)

Once you have your image texture the way you like it:

  1. Add lights if necessary to see your model.
  2. Preview in Viewport Shading Render until satisfied.
  3. Click on the object and choose File->Export->Static (lower left panel) and Export
  4. In the UV/Image area, click on Image->Save as Image. Name it and save it.
  5. Go inworld. Choose Mesh Upload, upload the mesh.
  6. Choose Image upload, upload the image.
  7. Rez the mesh, choose edit, add the texture.

Tutorials

There are many existing tutorials for unwrapping in Blender. Rather than create a new one, I will point to some good ones. I highly recommend the Born CG Tutorial #13 UV Mapping on youtube.

Written Tutorials

Videos