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

How Unwrapping and UVs Work

There’s something tricky that happens with textures, which define the colors of your models’ surfaces: You have a 3D model, but the image texture is 2D, so how do you “paint” a 3D model with a 2D texture? The answer is UVs. The 3D model has its vertices located on the X, Y, and Z axes, but for Blender, internally, they’re on the U and V axes as well, and the U and V axes are 2D positions, made to be used for texture projection. In the UV/Image Editor, you can access those UVs and adjust them to define how a texture is projected onto a 3D model.

Unwrapping (also called UV mapping) is the process of adjusting an object’s UVs so the texture projection works properly. It’s probably easier to understand if you see how ...