Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Unwrapping a Mesh

The most precise type of mapping you can use is UV mapping. UV mapping also allows you to take advantage of other Blender features, such as Texture Paint mode and texture baking. With NURBS surfaces, you get UV coordinates for free as part of their structure. However, Blender is predominantly a mesh editor, and in order to get proper UV coordinates on your mesh objects, you must put those meshes through a process known as unwrapping.

To understand this process, think about a globe and a map of the world. The map of the world uses the latitude and longitude lines to relate a point on the three-dimensional surface of the globe to the two-dimensional surface of the map. In essence, the world map is an unwrapped texture on the globe, whereas the latitude and longitude lines are the UVs.

Marking seams on a mesh

You unwrap a mesh in Blender by selecting all vertices (A) and, while in Edit mode (Tab), either pressing U or choosing UV MappingUnwrap in the Tool Shelf. You then see a menu with a handful of options.

However, despite the menu's variety of options, unless your mesh is simple or a special case, you should use the first menu item, Unwrap. Blender has very powerful unwrapping tools, but to take full advantage of them, you need to first define some seams. Remember that you're basically trying to flatten a 3D surface to a 2D plane. In order to do so, you need to ...