Ultimate Unwrap 3D - UV mapping software

Beginner's Tutorial for Ultimate Unwrap 3D

Ultimate Unwrap 3D offers several UV mapping and editing tools, which makes it very flexible across a wide range of applications. For this tutorial, we will go through some basic steps to create, map, and texture a Rubik's Cube. In a very short period of time, you should be able to develop your own workflow to create a UV map.

Creating A Box

To speed up UV mapping, especially for short projects, you can create a variety of basic primitives within Ultimate Unwrap 3D. To start, let's use Ultimate Unwrap 3D to create a segmented box primitive. Click Create | Box, set the width, height, and length dimensions to 6 and set the width, height, and length divisions to 3. Click OK.

This what you should get below. Note that whenever you create a new primitive, Unwrap 3D will automatically generate UV coordinates for it. In this case, box mapping was used:

If you want to apply box mapping yourself:

1. Select everything. You can use Select | All from the main menu, use the hotkey Ctrl+A, or use the selection tool to drag select all UV coordinates in the UV Editor.
2. Click 2D Tools | UV Mapping | Box. Use default options and click OK.
3. You should see the exact same UV mapping in the UV Editor.

Exporting the UV Map

Now that our UV mapping work is done, we can export our UV map to a bitmap for painting. Click File | Export | UV Map:

There are several options here, but for now, select Default color, uncheck Fill, set the Background color to gray (128,128,128), select Use line color, set the Line size to 8, and set the Line color to black (0,0,0). Click the Preview to view the bitmap before saving it:

As you can see, this creates thick black lines, which will work out nicely after our texture map is painted.

Painting the texture is a relatively easy task. The basic colors for a Rubik's Cube are red/yellow, green/white, and orange/blue. Open up the UV map bitmap in your favorite paint program (e.g. Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro) and fill in the colors as shown above.

Materials and Textures

Now that we have our painted texture map, we can import it back into Unwrap 3D. But, first, we need to create a material for it. In the Scene Window, right-click on Materials, and select Add. You can also use the Insert hotkey to quickly add items in the Scene Window:

This adds a new material called Untitled, but we can rename it to anything we want. Right-click on the new material and select Rename. Let's call it cube_mat.

Now, double-click on cube_mat. You should see the Material Editor dialog box appear. Go straight to the Maps property sheet. Here, we want to load a bitmap from file, so select Bitmap for the diffuse texture map. Then, click on the Properties button:

Here, we can load our texture map. Click the Change button to browse for it and then click OK.

Just a quick note for future reference, whenever you import a model, Unwrap 3D will look in the same directory as the model for its textures. So, it is best if you keep all files in the same directory.

If you take a look at the Scene Window again, you will see a T icon next to our cube_mat material. This means that it has a loaded texture map:

Materials and Assignment

Now that we created a material and loaded a texture for it, the next step is to assign faces to it. First, click Ctrl+A to select everything. Note that when assigning faces, Select | Face must be enabled.

While the UV coordinates are still selected, right-click on cube_mat, and select Assign:

In the 3D perspective view, you should see our texture map. Also, if you select cube_mat again, the texture map will automatically appear in the UV Editor background. Unwrap 3D will also automatically adjust the UV map to the texture's aspect ratio. In this case, since the texture map is 512x512, the aspect ratio is 1x1, so no adjustments are required:

Congratulations, you just UV mapped a Rubik's Cube using Ultimate Unwrap 3D!

Summary

In this beginner's tutorial for Ultimate Unwrap 3D, we learned some basic UV mapping techniques such as box mapping, learned how to create a UV map, learned how to create a material, load a texture map for it, and assign faces to it.

If you want to improve upon the Rubik's Cube, here's a couple ideas:

1. Add some randomness. Fill in some random colors on each side.
2. Can we use a box with only 6 faces instead of 54 faces? Yes, you can. In fact, you can use the same texture map as above, so you don't have to paint in the missing lines.
3. Rotate a section of the cube 45 degrees. You can do this by creating 3 individual segmented boxes instead of just one. Each box will have dimensions of 3x6x6 and divisions by 1x3x3. You can then freely rotate one of the sections.

That's it! If you have any other questions about Ultimate Unwrap 3D, please let me know.