UV channels allow the same object to have multiple UV maps. One final thing to know about UV maps is UV channels. This is even more important when developing for weaker machines like mobile phones. This technique can be very useful as it allows you to keep your texture sizes down which means if you are using a game engine it will generally run smoother. If a texture is quite basic then you may have multiple parts of your mesh over the same UV space to repeat the texture. That said there are times where you may intentionally use overlapping UVs. Overlapping UVs are usually something you want to avoid so you can keep your texture varied and not accidentally end up with your texture looking incorrect. This means that these two parts of your model will display the same information of the texture as they both occupy the same UV space. Overlapping UVs are when you have two or more of the polygons in your UV map on top of one another. It can become quite a tedious process but it is essential to the 3D workflow.Įven if you don’t intend to texture a model, many modern real-time engines such as Unreal Engine 4 or Unity need your assets to be UV unwrapped to perform some of its light baking.Īnother thing to consider when unwrapping your 3D mesh is overlapping UVs. However, a cube is a basic example and as the meshes get more complex so do the UV maps. If you’ve ever made a cube out of a cross of paper before, you have done the same process, only in reverse! This may seem like a confusing idea at first, but it’s really very simple. This is where UV mapping comes in, as it is the process of translating your 3D mesh into 2D information so that a 2D texture can be wrapped around it. However, there is no such thing as a 3D texture, as they’re always based on a 2D image. Now to give life to the mesh and make it look more realistic(or stylized) you want to add textures. Once the polygonal mesh has been created the next step is to “unwrap it” into a UV map.

The U and V refer to the horizontal and vertical axes of the 2D space, as X, Y, and Z are already being used in the 3D space.

The process of creating a UV map is called UV unwrapping. A UV map is the flat representation of the surface of a 3D model used to easily wrap textures.

Unwrap 3d mesh