Friday, September 16, 2011

A Very Quick Blender UV Unwrapping Tutorial

I was asked for some help with UV unwapping in blender so I put together a very, very quick tutorial on it.

This tutorial was written for Blender 2.5 and will apply a simple texture to the default cube.

1. Split off a new viewport window by dragging the corner red-boxed below.

2. Change the view of the new window to UV/Image Editor

3) Select the cube and enter edit mode

4) Change to edge select mode (either press the edge select button or press ctrl-Tab and select Edge)

5) Press the red-boxed button to turn off limit selection to visible

6) Shift-right click to select the highlighted edges

7) Press ctrl-e to bring up the edge context menu and select Mark Seam

8) Press 'a' twice; once to clear selections, a second time to select everything then press 'u' to open the unwrap context menu, select Unwrap

9) At this point you should have something that looks like the following

10) Open your texture image

11) Adjust your UV mesh to cover the correct parts of the texture

12) Change the render mode of the right viewport window to textured to check the UV mapping

That's it.  Your cube is now UV mapped.  To use this in an XNA project select File -> Export and export the image as an FBX file.  After adding the FBX file to your project do not forget to copy the texture to the content directory for the project.  Do not add the texture from Visual Studio, just make sure it is in the content directory.  If you have problems loading the texture when you build your project you may have to open the FBX file and edit the texture path to be relative to your content directory.

Here is a link to the cube texture I used for this demo: cubeTexture.JPG

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