Transcription
So you want some flapjacks, but Jack doesn’t know how to flap, and flap can’t jack, so you just settle for waffles instead.
Hey guys, I’m Kai, and today we're back once again, taking a look at how to add an image or a texture onto an object. We've done this before a long time ago, and many people mentioned that some things have changed and it works differently now. So I’m here to redo this and help you guys out.
Let’s go ahead and get started. The first thing you can see here is we have the default cube; we’ll just use the default cube today. The first step is to go down to the Material tab at the bottom right of the screen. Click the little yellow circle next to Base Color. Once you hit that, you can change this to Image Texture. Boom!
When it says Image Texture, it opens up a dialog box that shows New and Open. If you already have an image set, you can open it right here, or you can hit New to add a new image. You can draw one in Blender, but we’re going to open an actual image from your computer instead. Let’s hit Open. This will open up your file folders. You’ll need to find the picture you want to use, whether it's in your Pictures, Downloads, or wherever it’s saved.
For this example, I’ll select an image of the North Pole. Once you click on it, it will open, but you won’t see anything on the cube just yet. What you can do is go up to Material Mode at the top right and select the Material Preview option, which is the third button among the four circles. Now, when you scroll in, you can see the image of the North Pole on the cube.
However, everything looks a bit weird; the texture is misaligned. There's a couple of ways to fix this. First, let’s put our cursor in the top left of the screen until it turns into a plus sign. Then, click and drag to split our window into two pieces. In the top left of the new window, you’ll see a button that says Editor Type. Click that and change it to the UV Editor.
Once you do that, hit the drop-down menu and select the image. You’ll see that the mapping of the image is all over the place. To fix this, hit Tab to go into Edit Mode. On the left-hand side of the image, you'll see a cross-like structure with all the little pieces correlating to the sides of the cube.
To unwrap this properly, we can select Face Select Mode at the top and see each face of the cube highlighted. The problem is that the UV mapping does not appear correctly. You can hit 'U' to unwrap it, but don’t just select the regular unwrap option because it will not give a good result. Instead, you can choose Smart UV Project, or Cube Projection, so all the faces can be matched up properly.
Now you can select each piece by going to Face Select Mode and hitting 'S' to scale it. For instance, you can scale the top face to fit the entire picture of the North Pole on the cube. If you want to position the texture exactly as you need it, you can play around with the sizes to ensure everything looks good.
For specific situations, I recommend Smart UV Project. Hit OK, and the pieces will be nicely arranged. When you hit 'G', you can move them around independently, unlike the previous option where pieces were all connected, leading to a strange layout.
To summarize, always use Smart UV Project for improved layout management, and you can easily adjust the scale and position of each piece of the texture according to your preference. You can rotate pieces by hitting 'R' and see how the image spins around, allowing you to position it just right for your creative vision.
That's how you add an image to an object. It’s a very cool feature and quite easy to do. I hope you all enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new. I will see you in the next one! Until then, bye-bye! [Music]