SOFT WARE: BLENDER
Freddie Chase, Adelaide
Blender 3.6 received upgraded and improved functionality when it comes to packing UVs. The new workflow and tools enable a much tighter packing and significantly more efficient use of the UV space itself.
This is vitally impor tant as efficiently using the UV space will result in higherresolution textures compared to inefficient alternatives. This is referred to as texel density and is a vital part of UV mapping. The new engine is great for large meshes specifically, and improves support for nonsquare materials.
Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, it’s helpful to have a good understanding of what UV mapping is. UV mapping is the process of specifying a given texture space so that it can be accurately applied onto a 3D mesh.
The letters U and V refer to the two axes that represent our 2D texture. You can think of it as X and Y, with X or U going horizontally and Y or V vertically. Through this, any image can then be applied onto a model in the exact way the 3D artist wants. Another key term to know is ‘UV island’, which refers to a connec ted group of polygons within a UV map. Each UV map will contain any number of islands.
The process of setting up UV maps might seem like an unnecessary step that slows the whole creative process down, but it’s absolutely vital. The real world is rarely made up of predic table and uniform shapes such as boxes and circles. Natural forms and curves are everywhere and it’s essential that 3D artists learn to create custom UV maps so their textures can be properly applied to the model. For those in architectural visualisation this is par ticularly noticeable, and required in the area of furniture design where shapes and seams are rarely regular.
The new Blender UV mapping engine is not only far better at packing UV islands in, but it’s now also possible to pin specific islands to exact positions in the UV space so all the other islands are packed around it. This provides a lot more control to the artist, and it’s even possible to pin more than one island. In answ
