BA5 Studio Project | Production #24

Unwrapping the UV’s on the Photo Frame

Today I begin working on the UV’s for the photo frame which is on the bookshelf. I *think* I am getting the hang of the UV’s. I definitely just need to keep practicing.  Here is my workflow process. 

As Lothar suggested, I should decide the areas of focus and importance then split them into main areas to UV. The first area I decided was important was the area that would have the photograph. I decided to give this face its own UV map but selecting it > planar mapping along the X axis. 

 

The only issues I came across were that when I opened the UV editor I already had a net there as if I had used auto mapping; which I hadn’t. So I was a little confused…its probably supposed to be that way haha. My point is that it was distracting when I was trying to pull apart the UV I had just manually unwrapped (the frame front face) as I am still a little clumsy within the editor; must gain more confidence here! :D

 

I then moved onto mapping the front edges of the frame which face the player. These will also need a higher quality and therefore I have made the UV’s the same size as the picture area.  I also repeated the same process by selecting the inner faces which point inwards. 

 

Now that all the front areas, which are the most visible area to the player, I moved onto my “section 2” which are the outer borders of the frame. For these I did them separately and used a planar map projected along the Z and X axis to get an accurate map.

The only problem I seemed to face was the angle of the projection. As you can see the UV’s are diagonally orientated which I guess could be okay? I don’t really know, all I knew was that I would MUCH rather they were straight. 

 

To manipulate this I selected each of the edge verts in the UV map  and used the straighten tool on the UV editor to make the edges straight. 

 

This in turn ensured that the checker pattern was aligned correctly on the sides of the frames.  I repeated the process of selecting verts on the UV’s and using the straighten tool to make sure all the sides were correctly aligned.

 

I moved onto the front of the frame by selecting the front faces and then planar mapping from the correct axis to get the right projection. As you can see on the UV map the shape is mainly square, which is wrong, the shape of the frame is actually rectangular so I had to manipulate the shape to ensure it roughly matched the same shape of my model.  

  

I repeated the process so that I eventually had mapped the entire frame. I left the back faces smaller on the UV map because the player  just wouldn’t see them so it would be a waste of good UV space ;) 

 

Next job was to unwrap the frame stand which was slightly more difficult because of the angles and misshapen uvs that I had to sort out.  The way I tackled it was to assign faces of the frame to particular axis and planar map them accordingly. I would also map the top and bottom face at the same time. 

 There are still areas of the UV's I need to work on because they aren't perfectly square which obviously defeats the object but for now I am happy that these are unwrapped and ready to place onto the UV map.