HowTo:FullUnwrap7Orient
Optimizing ship orientation for UV unwrapping
For the Vegastrike engine, and in OpenGL, we're used to orient our ships in 3D such that, if one is sitting at the cockpit, X grows positve to the left, Y grows positive in the forward direction, and Z positive is up from on top of your head. Blender is not like that, though. The Blender developers decided that Y is up, and Z is forward. Ever since I've been using Blender, I've been using the Z is up standard. In the final analysis, it should make no difference, right?
Wrong! Finally, for the sake of this tutorial, I decided to make an experiment:
My biggest complaint about Blender has always been the numpad numbers for changing views. Specially the 15 degree rotators... Well, that was the problem: I just turned my ship so that Z is forward and Y is up, and Bingo: I can now view my ship from the side such that front is to the left, back to the right; and I can use the 8 and 2 numpad keys to turn the ship like barbecue. That's exactly what I had always wanted to be able to do in Blender... Grrr... Anyways, if I ever said to you that Z is up, in some other tutorial, forget it. Z is forward. We can rotate the ship at the end, before exporting; but from now on I'm going to use Blender's orientation from the start of a design until the very end.
