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UV Editor

The UV Editor draws the selected brush and mesh faces flat over their tiled texture, so you can see which part of the texture each face shows. Use it for what the Texture tool cannot do in the 3D view, like placing mesh UVs to the pixel.

Opening it

The UV Editor is a tab in the right panel, next to the Inspector, and Texture > UV Editor brings it up too. Then select faces: Shift+click one in a view, or use the Texture tool. The top line names the material and how many faces you have.

The UV Editor with one wall face selected, drawn as an orange rectangle over the tiled showcase/plaster texture

Tip

While the UV Editor is the visible tab in its panel, Ctrl+click on a brush or mesh selects all its faces, so every side can be textured at once. Brushes and meshes that were already selected turn into their faces as well. When the selection holds anything else, such as a terrain or an entity, Ctrl+click adds and removes objects as usual.

A brush face normally gets its texture from one offset, scale and rotation. A face with explicit UVs stores a texture position for each corner instead, which is what meshes need. The UV Editor draws those faces blue, and you can pick their corners one by one. Orange faces have no explicit UVs and move as a whole.

Controls

The ? at the end of the top line shows these in the editor too.

Input Result
Drag empty space Move the texture, or the whole faces when they have explicit UVs
Wheel, right drag Scale, rotate
Click a corner Select it together with the corners of neighboring faces stitched to it
Shift+click, Ctrl+click Add, remove
Alt+click Select only that face's corner, to split a stitch
Shift or Ctrl+drag on empty space Box select, adding or removing
Drag a selected corner Move the whole selection
Double click a corner Gizmo that moves along U or V only, Escape hides it
Middle drag, Ctrl+wheel Pan, zoom the canvas

With corners selected, the wheel and right drag scale and rotate them around their center. The U and V fields under the canvas place the selection to the pixel.

The small buttons after the menus switch pixel snap, show the texture's hotspots, make a plain drag box select, show the gizmo, toggle UV lock and frame the faces again. Hover one to see which is which.

Mesh UV projections

With mesh faces selected, the Projection menu lays out explicit UVs for you. It uses the texel density a brush face with the same texture would get, so meshes match the brushes around them. Hover an entry for a one line explanation.

The Projection menu of the UV Editor open, Cylinder Y hovered with its tooltip, Wraps around this world axis through the center of the faces, u runs around it

Command Result
Planar, Planar X, Y, Z Projects along the direction the faces mostly point, or along one world axis, keeping them in one piece
Box Projects each face from its closest world axis, for blocky shapes
Cylinder X, Y, Z, Sphere Wrap the texture around the faces, for pipes, columns and domes
View Projects straight along the 3D camera
Unfold Lays the faces out flat edge by edge, so strips and grids stay continuous
Reset to World The projection of a freshly reset brush face
Bake Planar Turns the planar texture into editable corner UVs, shown while some faces have none yet
Clear UVs Drops the explicit UVs again
Normalize Scales the UVs to fit the texture once
Pack Packs the islands into the texture at one texel density

Here a 12 sided column got Cylinder Y, its sides now run side by side as one strip around the texture:

The UV Editor after Cylinder Y on a 12 sided mesh column, its side faces laid out as one continuous strip

The UV menu flips, turns, fits, aligns, straightens and snaps to pixels. The Hotspot menu fits to a hotspot rectangle, see Hotspots.