Week 6 Class Practical: Part 4 - UV Texture Editing (Cardboard Box)

When working with simple geometrical shapes adjusting the texture wrapping by change the fields in the attribute editor will work fine, however if you need more precision that's where the UV texture editor comes in. This tool gives you discrete control over how a texture is applied to an object, essentially unfolding your object into a 2D flat surface, allowing you to align your textures with more precision. To begin, I have created a cube and applied a simple cardboard box texture to it.

As you can see, the default UV map for this object is misaligned on some of the faces and we need to edit these manually. This is achieved by going to the "UV" menu and selecting "UV Editor". This shows us a flattened version of our model and the texture applied to it.

Editing the UV mesh is very similar to editing a normal object. Selecting vertices in the UV editor will only edit the vertices for the UV mesh (using the UVW coordinate system discussed in an earlier blog post) leaving the actual object geometry unaffected. After lining up the vertices for each face of this texture the object texture looks much more accurate as shown below.