Setting up the user interface

-Blender's user interface is amazingly configurable. But it also comes with several built in interface layouts and they work pretty well. Up at the top of the screen there is a layout menu and if I click on that I get a list of layouts for different tasks:animation, compositing, motion tracking. But for our purposes I'll chose UV editing. It displays the UV image editor on the left as well as a 3D view on the right. This is the layout I'll be using most often during the course. Now even though this isn't a rendering course per se, I will change the default render engine from Blender internal to the newer Cycles renderer.

Cycles is an unbiased path tracing rendering system and I think it's a great leap forward for rendering in Blender. For more information check out lynda.com's course Rendering using Cycles in Blender. It's a great introduction to the topic. But I mention this because it affects how we make our test checker pattern visible in the 3d view. So to create a test pattern I'll go to UV image editor and click on new at the bottom of the screen. Here I can give it a name.

And for generated type I'll choose UV grid. Now the problem here is that if I go to the view port shading menu in the 3D view and choose textured, I still don't see the checker pattern on my object. To view this I need to connect the texture to my material in the note editor. So I'll switch the UV editor to the note editor for a moment to hook this up. I'll click the use nodes check box to see the nodes.

And here I have the default defuse material going into the material output node. I need to add a texture node and choose image texture. I'll click on the browse menu and select my checker pattern. And now I can see it in the 3D view. This'll help me test for any stretching in my UV maps. But notice that if I change to rendered shading, I can't see the checker pattern. Now I'll probably wanna see the textures on my object as I do test renders of my scene.

So just connect the color socket of the image texture node to the color of the defuse material and now we can see it in our renders. I'll change this back to the texture view and this view back to the UV editor. And I think we're ready to start UV mapping.