At the time you will be wanting to use the tool set that exists in the UV Room, your model will already have been given some form of topology and a tentative UV Map arrangement - based on the “Unwrapping” you performed in the Retopo Room.

In this context, the “Texture Menu” appears in the Main Menu Panel with a list of “Import” functions.

As you can see, all of these Import functions deal with importing individual textures or Texture Layers. After creating a UV Map, the next logical step is to create layers of Texture which can then be exported along with your newly topologized model. And, if textures have already been created for this model the Texture Menu becomes available to import them.

In the Opening Dialog, there also exists an option entitled:
UV Map Model, which, if selected opens the “Import for Per-Pixel Painting” dialog - allowing you to import a model with existing UV’s that can be modified in the UV Room.

by ALEX MEISTER:

First we need to import our 3D Model into 3DCoat via the “UV Map Mesh” option in the quick launch menu – this will open the Import Object popup:

I tend to select the ‘Lock Normals’ option since I want it exactly as I exported it. (If you don’t keep them it will change most normals to smooth):

UV Map Typing can be changed to create new UV map, which will just create an auto mapping.

In my case, I already set 4 UV maps, so I wanted to keep them, as I will redo them later anyway (just a simple automap in maya, to have something in them).

Now that we have our model loaded and set up, we move over to the UV section (if it’s not there already, highlighted in orange). As you can see in the UV Preview (can be enabled under: Windows – panels) our UV looks pretty bad. It has too many Seams and that will give us a harder time Texture them properly – so let’s improve it.

There are multiple ways to do UV’s from this point on, the fastest but probably worst is automap, since it tends to create way too many UV Groups. But it might be useful in some cases where you don’t want to spend a lot of time on. If you are happy with the results, skip to “export”.

Auto Seams is slightly the better option but tends to get a few parts wrong, so go to “mark seams / edge loops “ to fix possible “bad” parts. Especially organic parts are usually not getting mapped the best way.

My personal favorite part of 3DCoat, is Mark Seams, while edge loop does mostly the same Mark seams can be used to just select part of a Loop or the entire edge loop via pressing the shift modifier.

How does it work? Simple, after you imported your model you press “clear Seams”, WARNING this will remove all your UV edges! (and create something like the image on the right) Then you create seams where you think they need to be and or where they won’t cause issues.

Left click just selects the edge
Ctrl + left click removes an edge
Shift + left click created an edge loop
Ctrl + shift + left click removes an edge loop
It might seem a bit strange in the beginning but it really get simple after a few uses and it gives you 100% control over where your seams should be created.