Week 4 – 3D Digital Animation – UV Mapping and Texturing

18/10/2023

Self Reflection

Today is Wednesday and we are focusing on UV Mapping and Texturing. UV Mapping is about ‘the process of generating a 2D representation of a 3D object. This 2D representation is constructed from UV coordinates, which are commonly known as texture coordinates. U represents the horizontal axis and V represents the vertical axis.’ Ref: What is UV Mapping | disguise

Texturing on the other hand is a process of applying or building textures to a shader or material. Textures are images that are attributed to materials. The material conveys the surface properties of the model. From the model’s colour to its shiny, transparent or reflective consistency and characteristics.

In class, we had to commit to three practice assignments on how to refer to texture throughout the UV mapping on the software Blender. For the first assessment, we continued to add texture to a dice/cube that was already made by the lecturer, using his instructions and videos for help. I did this by installing the dice jpg to the UV outline. This task was easy as I didn’t need any Photoshop or Krita to edit the picture onto the UV outline. The next task was to apply a Coke label to the Coke bottle which was a bit tricky as I found it tough to find the tools on the UV editor. The Tool Bar was constantly in ‘hide’ mode but this issue was easily resolved as I was competent to transform the image UV outline perfectly. The Hammer task was more complex because of the use of Seams and having to operate Krita to fit the image on the UV outlines. This had taken me longer to do but the result was worth it.

After this task, we had to model and texture a sword for our weekly assignment. The sword can be random or reference, I used this reference image for inspiration as well as a guide.