8. Unwrapping and UVs in Blender

Unwrapping is a fundamental step in animation that comes before adding textures to a 3D model. Without it, the textures would be randomly projected on the model’s surface. UVs (the 2D counterpart to XYZs in 3D space) are the internal 2D positions of the vertices of a three-dimensional mesh; they define how a 2D texture will be projected on the mesh’s surface. Unwrapping may look a little odd and it’s a task a lot of people dislike, but that’s usually due to their lack of understanding of how it works. Sometimes, it can indeed be a little tedious, but if you learn to like it, unwrapping can be a fun part of the process! Watching how everything starts to make sense and work properly can be a very rewarding experience, but be aware: you’ll need some patience.

Fortunately, Blender provides some helpful tools to unwrap your models and people who come from other software usually love the way the unwrapping process works in Blender (there are even glowing reports from professionals working on Hollywood films who use Blender for UVs). But as with almost everything else in Blender, unwrapping is done quite differently, so if you come from other software, forget the way you worked before and just open your mind for a little while!