This chapter covers UV Mapping the technique for Applying graphical textures to
meshes.
Explained are the various different ways to apply textures to object and meshes and why
Uv Mapping is advantageous.
How to seam mark and unwrap meshes are covered as well as various scripts which help
with that job (and some of which are no longer part of Blender 2.46). Good examples of
how to use the UV Unwrapping saving feature so that your UV Unwrapping can be saved in
a format which can be opened in Gimp. This makes editing the texture of a file much
easier than trying to do it within Blender.
One note I would make is that the method that is described for using Gimp with UV
Unwrapping could be slightly more complicated than needed. As Gimp layers are not
mentioned which would mean that users would not have to worry about UV Wrapping lines
if the UV Mapping picture is on a different layer.
An example wall is created and the process of UV Mapping it is carried out. With
seaming and unwrapping also covered. After the example is run through a discussion of
one approach to choosing the parts of a mesh to mark for seaming is discussed.
Once a mesh has been unwrapped the manipulation of the unwrapped mesh is described in
terms of moving/rotating and scaling unwrapped mesh vertices, within the UV Image
editor.
Pinning is also covered, which is one of the less well known features of Uv Mapping and
I was pleased to see it described in reasonably good detail. Especially the associated
Specials options from pressing the W key in the Uv Image editor.
Over all a useful chapter, apart from that fact that the unwrapping scripts that are
mentioned, some of them are no longer in Blender 2.46 and the UV Mapping process in
Blender 2.46 has changed from 2.45.
