Corey Johnson · Lead Character Artist

Looking at this piece, this blue part here, UV mapping is really just trying to get your geometry laid out as flat as possible.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

For what end?

Corey Johnson · Lead Character Artist

So that when you do apply textures and details like that, it doesn't warp and get all crazy. So I can do something like this. You can see here, it's not bad warping, but it's a bit. You want these squares to be as square as possible all the time, because anywhere where this is warping, if I put a material that, let's say, has a lot of vertical lines, you'll see that. The lines will start to skew. It'll show up in not a great way in the game because you'll see that it's skewing that way. So that's what UV-ing is all about.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So it's almost like when people do wraps on their car. It comes in a big flat thing, but when you look at it all flat, it's weirdly shaped and odd. But it's because they're anticipating all of the shapes and curves of the car and they're flat printing.

Corey Johnson · Lead Character Artist

Yeah, something else is, I think it's called papercraft. There's websites for it where you can basically get different plans of how you cut something out and then fold it together, and then you have a little character or something like that. It's the exact same stuff. So it's a very important phase.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's because textures are 2D and you have to apply a 2D texture to a 3D thing.

Corey Johnson · Lead Character Artist

It's taking something that is flat but needs to wrap over a surface that is not flat in any way. So you can see how it's all broken down. Based on the submats I set up, I often try to also have my UVs cut out that way. It just makes texturing easier because I can do texturing things based off of what my UV unwrap is, so just an efficiency thing.