UV mapping the furniture - Blender Tutorial

- I think we're now at the point in the project where we can begin thinking about texturing the scene. And to that end, I'm going to begin UV mapping the furniture in the room. Now if you're new to UV Mapping in Blender, please take a look at my lynda.com course, Blender UV Mapping. It's a general overview where I discuss the process of UV Mapping, what it is, why it's needed, and the tools that Blender has to offer to help us project two dimensional images onto our three dimensional objects. But if you've already had some experience with UV Mapping in Blender, then let's barrel ahead and start mapping our scene. I think I'll begin the process with this womb chair here. So I'll select that, and hit the period key on the numpad to frame it up, then I'll press Shift H to isolate it in the scene. I'll then go into Edit mode, and let's take a look at how we might UV map this. I think what I'm gonna do is just select an edge and mark a scene. I'll begin here with this edge on the main part of the chair, and I'll press Control E and Mark Seam. Now let's take a look at it in the UV Editing screen layout here. And now I'm gonna hover over that main part of the chair, and press the L key to select just that piece, and then I'll press U and Unwrap. And there is the UV map of that main piece of the chair. I'll do that again for one of these pillows, I'll select this pillow with the L key, I'll press Shift H to isolate it, and frame it up here, and then I think I'll just mark the edges along the back of the pillow and press Control E and Mark Seam. Now I'll select all of the pillow and press U and Unwrap. And let's do it again for the other pillow here. So I'll select this pillow with the L key, Shift H, mark these edges for our seams, Control E and Mark Seam. And then press U to Unwrap. So if I press Alt H to go back and see the whole chair, now I can select these pieces with the L key, and take a look at all of the UV islands for those objects. Now the UV islands here are overlapping, and we really don't want that. So I'm gonna press A to select all of the UV islands, and then I'll go to UVs, and we can average the island scale, and then pack the islands into the zero-to-one space. So I'll choose Average Islands Scale and then I'll choose Pack Islands. And the shortcut for these are Control A and Control P. All right, let's go back to our scene, and I'm gonna press Alt H to bring everything back. And for the next piece let's choose the eames chair, and I'll press Shift H to hide everything else, and then I'll go into Edit mode, and let's take a look at how we might do this. I'll begin with the cushions. I'll press the L key, I'll hover over and press the L key, and then Shift H, frame it up with the Period key, and then I'll choose these edges along the bottom here, and press Control E and Mark Seam. Now I'll select everything, press U and Unwrap. And this is the basic process we'll use for just about every piece that we UV map. So once again, Shift H, frame it up. I'll go ahead and choose Edge mode, and choose these edges. And then Control E, Mark Seam, Select All, U and Unwrap. Now for these wood pieces on the bottom here, I'll do the same basic process. I'll select that piece, Shift H, and this time I think I'll select these edges on the inside here. And then Control E, Mark Seam, Select All, and Unwrap. Most of the pieces now are UV mapped except these little buttons here. I'm gonna choose just one of these, and take a look at how we might UV map this. Now I could go through and Mark Seams on each one of these, but that might be a little tedious since they're so small in the seam. I think all I'll do is just select them, press U, and I'll use Smart UV Project. And Blender will just attempt to break up the pieces of the object as best it can. So I think that's all we need for those. So I'll just go ahead and select the rest of these by hovering over them and pressing the L key, and then pressing U and choosing Smart UV Project. So if we go through and select all the pieces that we've UV mapped, in the UV Editor here we can now press Control A, and Control P, and pack them all into the zero-to-one space. That looks good. Let's move on to the couch. For the couch we just go through the same process. So I'll select this cushion, press Shift H, frame it up, and I'll select some edges down here on the bottom for our seams. Control E, Mark Seam, Select All, press the U key and Unwrap. Let's take a look at the main piece of the couch here. I'll isolate it with Shift H, and we can probably split this up into different planes. So I'm gonna go ahead and select edges along this part of the couch, and I can probably split that out as a UV island, so I'll press Control E and Mark Seam. We can probably also select this part of the couch here, and split that out into its own island. So I'll mark a seam there. Now that we have all the parts of the object UV mapped, we can go into the UV Editor here and press Control A, and then Control P to pack all the islands into the zero-to-one space. So now I'll bring everything back with Alt H. And now we can begin thinking about what kind of textures we want to apply to our objects.