Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

8. Unwrapping and UVs in Blender

Unwrapping is a fundamental step in animation that comes before adding textures to a 3D model. Without it, the textures would be randomly projected on the model’s surface. UVs (the 2D counterpart to XYZs in 3D space) are the internal 2D positions of the vertices of a three-dimensional mesh; they define how a 2D texture will be projected on the mesh’s surface. Unwrapping may look a little odd and it’s a task a lot of people dislike, but that’s usually due to their lack of understanding of how it works. Sometimes, it can indeed be a little tedious, but if you learn to like it, unwrapping can be a fun part of the process! Watching how everything starts to make sense and work properly can be a very rewarding experience, ...