using the Point Edit tools and of basic UV mapping, plus some knowledge of gameSpace vocabulary and icon location. This tutorial also assumes you have a single mesh character model ready for UV mapping - I won't be showing you how to make one of those! Please also note about the screengrabs that color of the wireframes etc may vary depending on how you have your gameSpace set-up, but that does not affect this tutorial!

Before we begin, the author understands that there are many different ways to do the same thing. This is just one possible method, and there are others. You could also adapt or expand upon this method to fit your desired workflow.

Some users of an early release of gameSpace Light may find the their UV Editing window limited to a small size. If you experience this problem, please click here to download a patch (approx 3Mb) that will correct this problem!

The color of your model determines the color of the lines and vertices in the UV Mapping Editor, so it is worth painting your object with a solid color, using the plain Color shader, and choosing the color of your model to make it easier to view (you could even color different sections of your model differently, and they will show up with different colors in the UV editor).

The best way to control the size of the image that the UV Editor saves is to paint your object with a texture map of the correct size. For example, if you want to use a texture size of 512x512, then create an empty .BMP format image at that size, save, and paint your object using that file as a texture map. Note that this will change the background in the UV Editor - it will match the image file. The colors of the lines will continue to match the previous colors from the Color shader that was used previously.

I like to paint my model a solid black color, and then create an empty image file that is plain white and paint that onto my model in place of the previous solid black. Opening the UV Editor then gives me a white background in the UV Editor, with black lines for the model's geometry, similar to what you can see below:

One key point to remember as we work - every polygon must be accounted for! That is our goal, and keeping that in mind can help.

To being creating our UV mapping, first select your model and open a view from the back of the model. Select the Point Edit: Faces tool, and then select the Select Using Rectangle tool which will let us click and drag over our model to select our faces. Before we do that, though, right click on the Select Using Rectangle tool and make sure the Backside is unchecked. With this unchecked, only those faces which are actually facing us when we use the tool will be selected. Others that are facing away (on the backside of the model) will not be selected.

Below is our model in Point Edit mode, waiting for us to select the faces:

Now click and drag, and this will select all faces on the back of the model only. Below is what you see once the faces are selected using the Select Using Rectangle tool:

Now select the Planar UV Projection icon (you can see it in the screen below on the fly-out menu). This will apply a planar (flat) UV mapping. The important thing to note about apply UV mapping is that it ONLY applies to the selected faces. This allows you to assign different UV mapping to different parts of your object. The affected faces are highlighted, and in this example, they turn yellow (see below). Those faces now have their own, unique, flat UV mapping applied to them.

With the UV mapping still selected, the Object Info box (right click the Object Select arrow to open it, if yours is not already open) will now display the properties of the UV mapping, rather than the properties of the object. Note that when applying a UV mapping you can rotate, scale and move it, just as if it was an object in your scene!

In this instance, rather than use the tools to do this in the 3D windows, I am going to type the desired values directly into the Object Info box, to set the rotation to x -90, y 0, & z 0. You can see the UV mapping represented by the box surrounding the object as seen below, and this aligns the UV flat to the faces from the rear, which is what we want.

Here is an interesting point to note - the lighter colors of the Bounding Box for the UV mapping show which sides are the bottom and left, while the darker (blue colored) sides are the top and right. This is a good way to know how your image will map onto the faces from your current view.

Now resize the UV mapping until it is roughly twice the size of the model, and then move the UV mapping until the object appears to be in the the bottom corner left corner. This is easily done by using the Size and Move tools just as you would for any other object, or by using the active Bounding Box around the UV mapping. Alternatively, you could type the values for Size and Location into the Object Info box if you wish.

The end result that I am looking for can be seen below:

Now open the UV Editor by clicking on its icon. You will see the UV mapping only for the selected faces, and they fit into the image that will later act as our texture map as seen in the UV Editor - if we were to export now, and paint over the area of the image with the wireframe shown, we would in effect be painting onto the selected faces of our model.

While the faces are selected, you can move and scale the faces to place them where you like on the texture map. Remember that the larger you make it, the more detail you will be able to paint onto that selection, but also remember we have a lot of other parts of the model that we have not yet positioned on the texture map!

Here is one point you might like to note - when you open the UV Editor, you see the entire texture. It is then possible to zoom or move your view within the UV Editor, for instance using the widget in the bottom right hand corner. If you want to reset to the default view, where the UV Editor shows the entire texture and no more, and correctly aligned in the UV Editor window, simply close and re-open the UV Editor window. Please note that if you had the window displaying information for a selection of faces, as we have here, you would need to reselect those faces again before opening the UV Editor window, as otherwise it will show ALL parts of the model in the window, and we have not yet positioned the other parts of our model!

In the image below, you can see that I have scaled up the faces for the back of our figure, so that I can paint on them in more detail.

Now we need to repeat this procedure for the front of the model. Select a front view, then use the Point Edit:Faces and Select Using Rectangle tools to select the front faces, and again apply a Planar UV Mapping. This time use a rotation of 90, 0, -180 for the UV Mapping. You will also want to Scale and Move the UV Mapping so that the object appears in the bottom right of the UV Map plane, which will place it in a different section of your final texture.

I have positioned things so that the left image is the character as viewed from the back, and the right image is the character viewed from the front. Please note that these are "mirrored" in that the back view has the character's left hand shown on the left (just as if you were viewing the character from behind), and the front view has the character's left hand shown on the right (just as if you were viewing the character from in front). You can arrange things differently by adjusting the rotation of the UV Mapping when you apply the Planar UV Mapping option, it is up to you.

There are some areas that are not going to work just by UV mapping the front and back of the model - what about the underside of the character's feet?! Since they face straight down, they have not been accounted for just by using the two planar front and back maps, and remember our initial rule which says every polygon must be accounted for.

As an example, I will do the bottom of the character's feet. Select both those faces (you can use the Select Using Rectangle though this might grab other faces too - with a small number of faces it might be easiest just to select the faces one by one, using CTRL + click to add them to the currently selected faces). Then open the UV Editor and move the polygons for the feet to wherever you like, and probably scale them down unless you intend to add a lot of detail to the soles of the character's shoes!

You can see the polygons for the bottoms of the feet in the example below:

This is an important point, that you don't have to apply a UV projection to groups of faces, you can apply a UV map for just one face if its at an odd angle, or even for polygons that aren't connected or don't touch (like the ones on the soles of the shoes here).

By the way, if you are having a hard time locating a face in the UV mapping, close the editor and then on the model select the face that you cant find, then open the editor again. Only that one selected face will appear. You can then decide how you wish to deal with it to make it easier to find!

Some parts of a model are more important than others, and as such will require more detail on the texture map. Usually this is areas such as the head or face, which people tend to pay a lot of attention to. Remember, extra detail means using a larger amount of the texture map for those parts.

In our example, we applied UV mapping to the head in the back and then in the front when we applied the planar UV mapping to our selected faces. We could have selected those faces separately and applied UV mapping specifically to those back then; or we could select them now and apply UV mapping to them separately. However, another alternative is to do all this work inside the UV Editor itself.

In the UV Editor, use the Select using Rectangle tool to select the faces you want to add more detail for. In this case, I have selected the polygons that make up the head, and in fact I have selected the polygons for the head from the back view and the polygons for the head for the front view at the same time.

If I were to move these at this point, the polygons would stay connected to the polygons making up the neck (try it and see - you can use CTRL Z to undo). We don't want that! We want to make the head polygons entirely independent of the other polygons in the model.

A simple click on the Break Mesh Along Edges tool is all it takes. Then the selected polygons detach themselves from the others, and can be manipulated separately - below you can see the polygons for the front and back of the head being "lifted off" of the body polygons. I can then select the front and back polygons independently, and resize each group as I want.

First, you will notice how I have done a little work re-arranging the layout of the mapping, increasing the size given to the head so I can add more detail there.

This means I am now ready to save my set up from the UV Editor so that I can start painting a 2D texture to apply to my model. To do so, use the Export Bitmap option to save the map as an image in .BMP format.

You can easily save straight to the blank image you applied to the model earlier, or to another location if you choose. What you get is an image that contains the wireframe layout of your mesh, just as you arranged it in the UV Editor. This means you can now begin painting details onto the wireframe representing the head, the hands, the body, etc.

One handy tip here is to use layers, if your 2D application supports them. If you place your wireframe on one layer, you can paint over it on another layer without destroying the original wireframe beneath. This lets you see exactly what part of your model you are effectively painting onto, and allows you to change and repaint without wondering just where that original wireframe guide was, as you will still have it untouched beneath the layer you are using to paint your texture!

Be sure you save your model as soon as you close the UV Editor, so that you don't forget and lose all your hard work! The UV mapping saves right along with your model in either the Object or Scene libraries, so save now!

The above example may not be as far as we want or need to go. It is possible to refine the texture further by separating different body parts and arranging them on the UV projection to make the most efficient use of the space on the texture. For example, the hands may require their own UV mapping, or you could even map each leg separately (for example, applying a cylindrical UV projection to the legs and arms, and perhaps a cylindrical one to the torso even).

Whichever way you choose to work, make sure you know where each faces join together, and which face is which body part (you don't want to forget that those odd looking almost-oval shapes are the soles of his shoes!).

Below you can see a finished example. Top left is the unwrapped image saved from the UV Editor. This acted as a template for painting a texture map to add on the details to our model, and you can see how I have given more space to the head than the body, and I have separated out the hands here too and made them quite large to give them a lot of detail.

On the top right you can see the texture I painted for this particular character. You can see how important it is to remember which polygons represent what - it is not obvious in the first template that the polygons in the center are for the hands, though you can see that in the texture map I have painted.

Finally, at the bottom is a grab from inside gameSpace showing how it looks when we apply our texture map onto our game model.

This character from start to finish took about 7 hours from idea to game readiness. Thanks to the template, this character has 6 different textures (not shown here) that make him look totally different! It's easy to do that now that the UV mapping is set up and I have my wireframe guide to paint onto. Bear in mind you can go for more realism or for a more cartoon look or any other style that you choose - creating the 2D texture map is a skill in itself!

When it comes to painting the texture map, you might want to keep trueSpace open with your model loaded and with the 2D texture applied, the very same 2D texture that you are currently painting into with your 2D application. Every so often, as you paint and save your texture, you can switch back to trueSpace and do a quick render to see how your latest edits to the image look when applied to your model.

Don't be too surprised if you have to go in and tweak you model by adding a vertices, or if you ahve to adjust some UV mapping on a point-by-point level. For example, you might want to stretch out the amount of space given to the polygons on the side of the torso, which because of the initial Planar UV mapping will tend to be very thin and could give a 'stretched' look to the texture in that area. It isn't too hard to select the vertices and move them outward to give each polygon more coverage in the texture map, aiming to give each polygon roughly the same proportional space as nearby polygons.

This sort of adjustment and tweaking is the way it has to be done, unless you UV mapped it perfectly first time and your texture turns out flawless - if that happens, then all the better, but it is as rare as it sounds!

I hope you find this tutorial a useful introduction to UV mapping in gameSpace! Feel free to share your results on the forums.