UV Mapping Rounded Objects & Baking Long time 3dSmax.maya user, getting to grips of the great (and surprisingly free) Blender.. Going well so far, but now im completely stuck on a few things. - so would appreciate any insight on these things.


ok first up, is UV mapping. - im trying to texture a brick path that surrounds the model, its a huge circle basically, but the brick is 3 wide on the texture. - In 3D max Id UVmap to a spline path that would follow the curve, thus the texture would follow too. - there is not many options with UV stuff here, other than the basics. ive tried all sorts from unpack, to different map types. - but none yield the results I want.

The other question is a bit of a silly one.. but had me looking for hours!!

you map a floor for example. (actually shown above as it was that floor) - I set my UVs to how I want them, but kept within the bounds of the texture limit space. (as its going to UE4) so I cant stretch UVs. - but needed a quick way to tile textures so the scale is less or more, there was/is no way of doing this in 2.8 from what Ive seen, as all the help i got was from pre 2.8 and things are somewhat changed since.

Anwyay, the workaround WHILE very not ideal. is to add 2 nodes in the node engine, for UV and vector, this works fine, but when you are working with a complex set of textures alredy, and then need to preview textures on the fly, you have to go in an manually set this every time, and it takes lots of time to do, plus a lot of frustration!. - I would BE VERY happy for a "tile" option within the texture part of blender (why is there not one I dont know!) spoilt by other 3d programs I guess!.

Anwyay, ive been learning (still) learning... its been a challenge switching. but for good reason!. - Still lots to go through, but getting there day by day. and blender is actually really great!

Here is the 3D file.
blender File



thanks so much for the detailed answer.. sadly I think Im doing something wrong. - the results you have is what I want basically.

Ok here is what i did, just to be clear, I will repeat the steps I did.

Added seams similar to yours. but across the rest of the mesh (see pic)
The cross and center circle can be mapped normally, and moved thats not an issue. so mapped those first as you suggested.

The circle part on the outside, I selected a UV poly, Pressed U, and chose the follow quad, this did nothing. - To get this to work I had to select all faces, then the reults are what follows in the pic. - it sort of worked but in a very odd way!.

Please advise me where I went wrong. - and once again, thanks for your time.
In my example I marked all the red edges as "seams", then selected the cross only and pressed U - "project from view", then selected all the circle, selected one face as "active" (deselect then re-select one face) and pressed U "follow active quad". Moved and scaled the UV islands as I wanted, because the textures are automatically tiled outside their UV space.



For the second part of the question, a common workflow is to set the size of the texture scaling the UV outside the boundaries, then when satisfied with the result, create a new UV map optimized for export and bake all texures in a new image with the new UV map, so you can optimize your texture space.

After you've arranged your UV map, create a new one (properties window, vertex tab, plus button in the UVMaps panel (I called it Target UV), select all and press U project from view. Create a material with an emission shader controlled by the floor image with the first UV, create a second image node contgrolled by the Target UV, load a blank image of the desired dimension, have it selected in the node editor (even if it's not connected to anything), switch to Cycles Render and press Bake button with emission option. This will create a new image texture with a complete UV Mapping inside the boundaries.



Plus, enable the "Node wrangler" add-on in the preferences, so that you can select an image node in the node editor and press Ctrl T to quickly create the UV and mapping nodes.