Tree House UV Mapping

Ryan has a lot of UV mapping and texturing to do this term and I'm worried he may be overwhelmed with his workload, we were speaking to Dan and we agreed it would be a good idea if I learn how to do some basic UV mapping to help take some of the pressure off of him.


As it is my first time UV mapping I was a little unsure about how well I would do as it has always seemed like a complicated and technical role, but Ryan showed me the basics so I have enough knowledge to get started with the work. i tried UV mapping in the more accurate way where you make a projection and cut the UV edges to unfold them in the Texture Editor, but I found it too difficult crashing straight in doing so many new and complex tasks, so Ryan showed me a slightly easier method called Automatic Mapping which unwraps and creates UV maps for the object automatically.


I took on the role of UV mapping the interior of the treehouse, I had to create the UVs for each of the wooden planks which was easy enough, but because there are so many planks it has taken a very long time to do.


After I made the UVs for each plank I assigned a Lambert material with a black and white checker shader assigned to it, this is so you can see if the UVs are working correctly, if the checker pattern looks stretched or distorted then that means any textures that are applied to the object will also appear stretched and distorted, this is important because any problems like this have to be fixed before the UV maps are turned into a snapshot for texturing.

In the UV texture editor theres a useful setting that allows you to be able to see the UV edges which also appears in the perspective or orthographic view that you are using.

This screenshot shows the treehouse including the roof fully UV mapped and ready to be textured, it took a while to finish and I have to admit is incredibly boring and not something I particularly like to do, but as long as it's saved Ryan hours of work then I'm happy to have helped.