essential terms for UV mapping and texturing

If you’re new to uv mapping, this glossary will help to demystify some common technical terms

Baking

In this context, baking means prerendering the maps you can incorporate in your model’s texturing process, such as ambien occlusion, normal, curvature and position maps.

Compression

This type of distortion is caused by a large texture area being applied to a small part of the mesh. Like Stretching, it’s fixed via tweaking manually or a Relax function.

Cut

After you’ve defined (selected) the edge across which you want a seam to run, most applications, whether they’re stand-alone or native, will have a cut command, enabling you to cut islands on your map.

Flatten

To generate a non-distorted surface for the texturer to paint on via UV mapping.

Flipped uvs

You get flipped UVS if something got turned the wrong way, either when modelling or during your mapping process.

normals

The polygons in a mesh can face inwards or outwards. Their direction decides whether a texture displays facing the back or the front.. They’re bakeable.

multiple uv maps

Your UV map can be spread over several images, to facilitate extra detailing space, or component swapping, demanding you use multiple UV maps for your object.

overlap

Overlap is when you can see that you’ve got two or more faces on your map, which are partially or wholly overlaying each other. This means they will share the same bit of texture, potentially showing up as distorts.

projection painting

Projection painting is a method of painting directly on your mesh, calculating UV coordinates on the fly. This is very handy for tricky seams.

relaxing

Relaxing parts of your map means you’re minimising distortion via modifying the spacing between the map’s coordinates.

seam

A seam in UV space is pretty much the same as a clothing seam, and unless you’re working on a flat plane, you’ll have at least one seam in your map.

shells/islands

A shell/island is a piece of map that you’ve cut – a collection of connected UV faces, with outer borders (seams) that connect to other islands.