Unwrap UVW Mapping

This post is commenting on a new technique I learnt this week, which is Unwrap UVW Mapping. This technique was all new to me as I had never used it before, however neither had most of the other people in the lecture so I wasn't the only one. 

It seemed simple to begin with, firstly we needed to create a cube that  we had created similar to our house but with just a window and door otherwise the next step would have been very complicated. From there we needed to make the cube an editable poly, and use the modifier 'Unwrap UVW' then press the plus box and click on face, as this will allow me to select the faces of the cube and be easier to deal with cause the tricky stuff comes next....

This imge shows my very simple house, but is also showing what you have to select on the right hand side in order to arrange the shape.

You then needed to click on edit which is under parameters on the right hand side, this will pop up a new window where you edit the shape to create something else.

Once your window has popped up you un-check the pattered square near the top right, then click mapping then flatten mapping. This will then give you the shape you have created but in individual faces. When you see this for the first time the faces will be in different positions, you then need to join each of the sides together so that each face joins but in the right place, when you are joing the sides together you should be looking for blue lines when you select and individual face. This means that that face should be joined to the other face but connected on that blue line.

This image shows the UVW Unwrap modifier where you edit the shape that you have created, once you have joined your sides together, it should look like a flat pack cube.

Once all the faces were joined we needed to import the flat image into Photoshop and create background samples for the house for example wood, once this was done for the whole shape it needed to be saved ready for the next step.

Then once you have saved that image you just need to open the material editor and find the image and place it onto the cube,then comes the clever part, the UVW Map will know where each of the materials go on the shape and automatically place each of the materials in the right place.

This proved more difficult than I thought, especially when I had never used this method before, it was a struggle coming to grips with the techniques involved. With this in mind I couldn't quite grasp the importing into photoshop and placing the materials.

However I hope to have another go later on in the module and hope to have it finished by the end, otherwise I could focus on this too much and lose time on creating my model.