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What are UV Coordinates?

Started by January 19, 2003 07:35 PM
3 comments, last by Henry Wadsworth Longfello 21 years, 10 months ago
I know that UV Coordinates are for coordinating vertically and horizontally on a bitmap, but for what? Why are they called "UV?" Could I make my own blender for texturing objects and not read anything about this UV system? What''s so special about them, and why on earth would you clamp their values to 1 ? Wouldn''t that leave you with indecisive places on a bitmap texture? why not make the coordinates from "bottom left" of the bitmap and say a clambing of 128X64 units, if those are the dimensions of the texture...
Et tu Brute[And you Brutus.]
UV Coordinates aren''t normal BMP coords.
when you change a value to 1.0f you''re not changing it to the
2nd pixel on the image/BMP, you''re changing it to the last pixel
on the image/BMP, i.e
int   ImageWidth  = 640;int   ImageHeight = 480;float U = 0.5f;  // this coordinate is refering to the 320th pixel (640 * 0.5 = 320)float V = 1.0f;  // this coordinate is refering to the 480th pixel (480 * 1.0 = 480) 


Hope that helps...

KaMiKaZe
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TANX!
quote:
Why are they called "UV?"

To distinguish from the XYZ coord system... we use UVW.
"after many years of singularity, i'm still searching on the event horizon"
Also, using a value from 0 to 1 eases the problems when changing textures. For example, you can use a 32x32 texture at one moment, then switch it with a 256x256 texture without having to change the texture coordinates - those stay in the range of 0 to 1.

BTW - you don''t have to clamp to 1. Values over 1 typically signify wrapping. For example, a value of 2 means to repeat the texture twice when mapping.

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