What's the use of uvW texture mapping.

#1

Hi,

First of all I must say I’m a software engineer, not a pro in digital imaging, so my experience in the field is limited.

I’m curious, however, on when and why is it necessary to have a third dimension when unwrapping texture maps.

I’ve read that those may be used with procedural textures, but have not found any real-life usage of it. I remember using 3D Studio 3 at uni and having procedural wood that used the vertices coordinates, but that’s a long way in the past.

So my question is: Are UVW maps used nowadays in any practical case or are more like some remnant from past versions of software?

Thanks in advance,

Diego

#2

I believe tye W is fir winding order, which behaves much like face normal of a polygon but for UV shells. The winding order will determine the direction of the bump map. Becomes very noticable if you mirror geometry but do not reverse the winding order (flip or mirror) the UVs. Doing this on a head texture will show a visible seam in the bump map where the bump is reversed.

#3

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