Triumphantly conquered first real UV map …

Triumphantly conquered first real UV mapping challenge with creating my own seams such as in this simple tutorial and these very long and drawn out tutorials do rather than just ‘projecting from view’ like this tutorial gets you started doing. That last one is good at showing you how to get your 2d-friendly UV map back into a symmetrical grid by rendering the mesh texture only against the flat scuplty grid map, but I imagine any flat grid projection would work.

Tribe Big Bounce – Black Version

I actually got to polish this technique on what you would think is an easy placement of a logo on a sphere for Tribe, a great client.

No Logo Distortion – Yea

Ever seen those squished orange peel world maps, yeah, projecting that surface is not what you would think. So I selected and ‘Loop around Region’ed my way into a flat UV map of the locations where the logo is going, then moved that to Photoshop and positioned logo. Here’s the two logo images, the original from the 2d, and the UV mapped version uploaded:

UV Map from Seams

From 2D Art on UV Map Template

Final 512 Baked Texture

Then a quick ‘reload’ (alt-R) in the UV view in Blender refreshes the texture in the other half in Texture Paint mode for preview. Finally created new image mapped to flattened sculpty UV projection, exported image as 512 jpg and uploaded, no squishing or pulling of the font too radically. UV rocks, and although I have always understood the concept, actually applying it is becoming a powerful tool for all sorts of 3D building.

Looks like I get a texturing time block, woot.