Unwrapping Subdivision Surfaces in Blender

Speed up your UV unwrapping workflow. 

UV unwrapping is the process of 'unfolding' a mesh so that you can create a 2D texture which fits the 3D object. It is generally necessary if you wish to texture your object very accurately, either in Blender itself or in an external image editor. A UV map is the flat representation of the surface of a 3D model used to easily wrap textures. The process of creating a UV map is called UV unwrapping. The U and V refer to the horizontal and vertical axes of the 2D space, as X, Y and Z are already being used in the 3D space.

Once the polygonal mesh has been created the next step is to “unwrap it” into a UV map. Now to give life to the mesh and make it look more realistic(or stylized) you want to add textures. However there is no such thing as a 3D texture, as they’re always based on a 2D image. This is where UV mapping comes in, as it is the process of translating your 3D mesh into 2D information so that a 2D texture can be wrapped around it.