UV layout in Blender

UV unwrapping can be a tedious task, and it’s one that beginners often struggle with Thankfully, the most recent release of Blender benefits from a number of valuable improvements that make unwrapping more comfortable.

In this brief tutorial, I’ll show you how to perform a quick and easy UV unwrap on a character’s head and torso. As an example, I’m using the slightly simpler original version of the character featured on the 3D World 80 cover: Moonman. Using the technique set out on the right, even heavily exaggerated anatomy like this can be converted into a tidy UV layout ready for texture painting in a matter of minutes.

You have to think of unwrapping as though you were cutting your clothes open along their seams to get flat pieces of fabric. You first have to tell the unwrapper where to split the model into its individual pieces: face, chest, back and arms. Since you don’t want any of these seams to appear on the finished texture, you have to hide them in the right places. After that, it’s time for the actual unwrapping. The final step is to clean up the resulting UV layout by ‘pinning’ the points between which you would like Blender to stretch it, exactly as if you were stretching a piece of cloth on a table.

If you’re applying the technique set out here to a Blender model of your own, you will see that I make use of brand-new tools, such as interactive live unwrapping. These are not available in older versions of Blender. Blender 2.42 is now available for download; check the official site at www.blender.org for more information.