So you have a really cool model in Blender, now you want to add some textures to add some coolness factor. To achieve this we use a well known technique called ‘UV Mapping’ to map a 2d texture to a 3d mesh.
So in this tutorial i’ll be using one of the most basic shapes, the cube:
A basic Blender project with a cube at the centre
So we have our default Blender project setup with the cube at its centre (i’ve moved mine up slightly but thats only a preference).
- enter edit mode by pressing the TAB key.
Also you may want to switch to face select (once you are in edit mode):
Face select mode
- activate face select mode by clicking the face select option (in the menu of the main perspective window)
You’ll notice i have a split window with another view of my cube. I’m going to change this view to the ‘UV Editor’ view.
The UV Editor window option
At this point you may want to make sure you have all your faces selected.
- press ‘a’ to select all (or no) faces.
One of the main tasks of UV mapping is ‘Unwrapping’ our mesh to a 2d form.
- Press ‘U’ and select ‘Unwrap (smart projections)’.
- Click ‘OK’.
You should have something that looks like this:
Our unrapped cube
You’ll see in the UV view that our cube’s faces have been unwrapped to fill the view. There are many other methods of unwrapping a mesh for now this is the only one i will cover.
Now how do we get our texture into Blender? More so how do we export our UV map to work with?
- in the UV view go to UVs>Scripts>Save UV Face Layout
This window will popup:
You can just click ok at this dialog. Select where to save the image too:
Woo a texture!
Now we have a nice .tga file with all our UVs nicely layed out 
- Open the .tga file with the image editor of your choice (i use photoshop cs5).
For my tutorial i’ll just draw numbers on each of the faces. but you can do whatever you want with this image
- save the edited image in whatever format you wish, i recomend .jpg or .png. (note: if you use photoshop you can just use a psd).
- Now back in Blender, in the UV view, go to image>open.
- Navigate to your saved texture and click ‘open image’.
Now you should have something like this:
If you switch to Texture view you can see your mapped texture on the cube!
So hit ‘F12′ to render the scene, you may notice you still have no texture. This is because you need to edit the material to display it.
- hit ‘F5′ to switch to the materials panel.
- now enable the ‘text face’ option in the ‘material’ tab.
Now if you render you’re scene again ‘F12′ (fn & F12 if you’re on a mac) then you should see you’re texture wrapped around your cube!
I’ll be following this tutorial with more methods of UV mapping.
Thats all!
peace
-Bill
