Wolfire Games Forums

This is a question for david or anyone else who knows.
How do you set the uv coordinates for, lets say, a human character?
I need to have one texture covering the whole character.
What I did once was simply applying cylinder and spheric maps to parts of the model. But I think the results are not very good.

ok, what program are you talking about? i wouldnt know what to do anyway but i just wanna know the program

If you're using blender:

First, assign your texture to the material of the body as follows:
Select your model in the 3D view.
Go into the materials section of the Buttons view.
Go to the 'Texture' tab (in the materials section), create a new texture, give it a meaningful name like BodySoldier037HealthyTexture or whatever.
Go to the textures section of the Buttons view, your new texture should be selected. Assign the Texture Type 'Image' to it. Load your image by clicking the appropriate button. Adjust stuff so that the image is scaled correctly etc.
Now, back to the materials section.
In the 'Map To' tab, 'Col' has to be enabled in order to actually map the texture colors to your material.
Select 'UV' as the texture map input in the 'Map Input' tab to make your UV map work properly.

Second, UV-map stuff as follows:
In the 3D view in Object Mode, you select your model.
Now, go into UV Face Select Mode in the 3D view, go into front view,
[*
press 'A' to select all faces, deselect all faces that you can't see or want to map specifically, select 'Unwrap UVs' from the 'Face' menu in the 3D view header, choose an appropriate unwrapping method, Sphere-Unwrapping the faces you're seeing from front view makes sense, for example.
Load up your image in the UV/Image Editor view (open that view by splitting the 3D view in half). It's not auto-loaded for different art pipeline and workflow reasons.

Now... in the UV/Image Editor view, you have the face vertices and can manipulate them till stuff looks good.
*]

When you're done with the front faces, repeat * for the back of your model (you might want to select and unwrap from the back in the 3D view, of course), repeat * for the bottom, the top, whatever has been left out -- and you're done UV-mapping this sucker.

Also, check out the blender wiki and the video tutorials. This is covered there.

Hope that helped.

If you're not using blender... Someone else probably can help you.

Good luck!

Edit: Oh, if you're having serious trouble with some details, you can always request screenshot walkthrough stuff.

Thanks.
I am using lightwave.
In the texture wireframe of the wolf model in lugaru, I see that the textured parts are seperated. Like in an atlas.
I think what you have suggested me to do would have all the UV vertices connected.
In the lugaru model I guess there are places in the model in which there are at least two vertices in the exact same position, so different UV coordinates are assigned to them.

Yeah. The whole point of UV-mapping is _manually_ assigning texture bits to faces. Whether they overlap, touch each other or whatever doesn't really matter from the technical perspective.

Now, getting tutorials for Lightwave on this matter is fairly straightforward - you just google the heck out of it.

Here you go with two tutorials:
UV Mapping for Games, which is more of a beginner's first steps walkthrough, and UV Texturing with a Focus on Game Models for Serious Sam, which, as I believe, seems to pretty much hit your problem spot-on.

Hope you've got the insight into this particular software to do this, looks pretty straight-forward though. There's not that much magic to UV-Mapping, I'd say it's less of an art, more of a crafting skill. And it's always the same basic process, as one can easily see.

i think this is the best forum to post my problem: i want to make lugaru skins and i have an intel mac, which photoshop hasn't made a version for, that i know, anyone know any other program i can use, thats free?

Gimp is a free alternative to Photoshop.