Selecting specific faces in Blender

[Maiyannah]

Hi all,
So this is more of a blender question than a NWN one but I hit a frustration in trying to tweak my shield model for something I noticed and it’s driving me up the wall a bit, so I thought I’d ask here and see if anyone knew.

I’m trying to fix the top of my shield here:

My desire is to fix the texture from being stretched as you can see from this viewport.

But whenever I try to select things, I’m getting either the front face of the shield or the back, usually the back, or in this case even more maddenly, the handle. Is there some trick to this that I’m missing?

• May

[Maiyannah]

Managed to wrangle it by selecting each individual vertex but if someone has a better way of doing it I would love you.

[Tarot_Redhand]

That looks like a UV mapping problem. Here’s a tutorial I’ve book-marked for (much, much) later study. With a bit of luck it should help.

Intro to Blender UV Mapping

TR

[Maiyannah]

Yep, it absolutely was UVmapping related. You can see this if look at the before and after of the uvwraps…

Before:

After:

What I was struggling with was selecting the proper faces. In fact, they did not exist, which is probably why the UVmaps were weird.

What I had to do was select each of the polygons verticies individually and make each face anew. You couldn’t just do this all at once because Blending has some rounding imprecision and this caused the edge to have the back of the shield’s face protruding through it, but by selecting and creating each polygon in the edge as a face, and then selecting each faces in the “top” “right” and “left” edges, I could create the UVmap I needed.

(The screneshots will not directly correspond, I am redoing this on my already fixed model for sake of documenting the process)

First I go to the Modelling workspace:

Then I make sure that I have the wireframe view, and vertex select enabled:

Then I go through and select the vertex for one polygon:

If you have difficulty selecting the correct thing - the frustration I had - press alt while clicking and it will cycle through the valid selections.

Once I have this polygon’s four corners selected, I right click, and make it into a face:

You can also use the F key, as the menu indicates.

I repeated this process for the other polys in the top edge.

When this was complete, I went to UV Editing mode, and made sure I had the Face Select enabled

I then selected all the new faces, and redid the UV map. Blender will do this for you fairly automatically if you right click, and select UV Unwrap, as below:

This will generate a map on the texture in the left hand window (by default):

You can then edit this UV map as you see fit, but Blenders automatic unwrap was good enough for me.

It feels like there should be a quicker process for this since the UVwrap did already exist, as the face was textured, it was just incorrect, so I welcome someone letting me know of a better process, but this one at least worked for me!