BLENDER: UV Unwrap and prepare texture

Mark the seams
Go into EDIT mode by pressing TAB key if you aren't already in edit mode.

Now you may need to add seams to your object. Try to imagine your object as a stuffed animal with seams or a paper figure. Add the seams in places that aren't highly visible.

With the ball we decide that a seam along the side circumference would work best.

Press A to deselect if there's anything selected. Press 7 to get into top side view. Press 5 if needed to get into orthographic view. (Pressing 5 would swap views between orthographic and perspective) Or choose the views from the View menu as described on

previous page.

Hold down ALT while clicking on the center horizontal line.

Hold down SHIFT and ALT and click on the opposite side.

If you do mistake, just press A once or twice to deselect and try again. While the circle is highlighted in orange (make sure it is a full circle around the ball), press CTRL+E to bring up the menu. Choose Mark Seam. The seam will show up marked as red line.

Repeat for all the edges you want to be marked if you are doing other shape than the ball.

UV Unwrapping
While in EDIT mode (TAB) select your object with pressing A once or twice so all of it is marked in orange. Press U and choose Unwrap.

Press SHIFT and F10 to go to UV/Image Editor view.

See your result. Is it all flat and nice, and not overlapping anything? If not, go back to the 3D view (SHIFT and F5) and change your seams and repeat the unwrapping until you get a good result.

For the uniform colored ball it is not as important but it is good to practice.

Finish with press SHIFT and F5 to go back to the 3D view. (Should we move the texture making to this section instead for previous page? What do you think? Then we can go to the UV view and choose export UV layout or should it be saved for the more in depth articles?)

Alternative method
Instead for marking seams and you have a simple object you can choose Smart UV Project under the Unwrap menu (U key). It may produce a perfectly good result!

Creating the simple uniform colored texture
''EDITOR'S NOTE: Info on how to make a template text to be added here. It is not really needed for now, but for understanding the work order it is good to be added.''

Open an Image Editing software. For this example Paint will do just fine. Open a new file with the measurements 256 * 256 pixel. It doesn’t matter at this point how big it is, but it is best in this case to keep it small.

Use the “Fill” tool (paintbucket) to paint it red. Save this Image as “Red_BC.png“. This tells the Thememaker's Toolkit to paint all the faces of the object that are assigned to the material “Red” with this colour you just chose. “BC” stands for Base Colour.

''EDITOR's COMMENT: Should we add info on which size is the smallest you can use? 256x256 pixels is a suggestion. Can we go smaller?''

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BLENDER: Make an object with graphic texture