ESSENTIAL TERMS FOR UV MAPPING AND TEXTURING (CONTINUED)

smoothing group

A collection of polygons you can define. Together, they render as a seamless smooth surface. You see a hard edge where one group stops and another begins.

stacking

Stacking in a UV map means placing similar islands/shells on top of each other to save space.

stretching

Stretching is caused by a small texture area being applied to large parts of the mesh. It’s fixed by tweaking the area on the map it’s been applied to.

topology

The topology can be thought of as the terrain of the model. And just like with real maps, a UV map consists of the terrain of the mesh.

udim

Most renderers still read UV space as a single tile with a 0.1 coordinate set. UDIM is a recent format which enables you to group your UVS in tiles, rather than stacking them on top of each other and then separating them by group or material.

uv space

The grid you have in your UV mapping application contains UV coordinates (0 to 1). You can work outside the grid when working, but you need to have your final map inside of the grid.

Weld

This refers to welding or sewing bits of a map together. It’s often easier to unwrap into smaller pieces and then put them back together again than deal with individual parts in isolation.