Noobish question about closing off an empty face in mesh

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

So I managed to get the hang of the extrude and scale technique to build a simple mesh object (start with a plane, extrude up, scale out, etc and then back down for the outside). Think baking tray and you'll have a clear enough image of the shape. I even managed to figure out how to seam it so it UVs into two tidy pieces which fit well one above the other in a square UV/AO texture. (The final piece is going to be all about the texturing, especially the top, so keeping that as neat as possible is important.)

The thing is, it doesn't have a bottom. I added another plane but it compromised the UV.

Before I try cleaning all of that up manually, am I going about this in a reasonable way or is there a better approach to the whole thing?

Thanks for any help. I'm using Blender 2.7 and still get lost quite easily in it.

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

So I managed to get the hang of the extrude and scale technique to build a simple mesh object (start with a plane, extrude up, scale out, etc and then back down for the outside). Think baking tray and you'll have a clear enough image of the shape. I even managed to figure out how to seam it so it UVs into two tidy pieces which fit well one above the other in a square UV/AO texture. (The final piece is going to be all about the texturing, especially the top, so keeping that as neat as possible is important.)

The thing is, it doesn't have a bottom. I added another plane but it compromised the UV.

Before I try cleaning all of that up manually, am I going about this in a reasonable way or is there a better approach to the whole thing?

Thanks for any help. I'm using Blender 2.7 and still get lost quite easily in it.

[Aquila Kytori]

Hi

There isn't really another way of doing it.

Its almost always , create the mesh , UV unwrap then texture.

Usually the UV unwrapping is done after the mesh is finished. In your particular case where you added the bottom face later (and then UV unwrapped the whole tray again ?) it messed up your original UV map.

Perhaps what you should have done was select only the new bottom face and unwrap that face by itself so the unwrapping wouldn't have effected the rest of the mesh. Then, because the bottom face doesn't need to have the same detail texture, pixel density as the upper faces, the UV island for that bottom face could have been scaled a lot smaller and a place found for it somewhere on the original UV map.

Spending time editing UV’s is a normal part of the process. Sometimes rearranging the UV’s can take more time than was spent creating the actual mesh.

There are quite a few tools in the UV’s menu one of them is called Pin. Selecting vertices in the UV editor and then Pinning them will pin those vertices in place so that if you re unwrap your mesh those pinned vertices will not be moved. I mention that because that was something you could have done with your original UV map before unwrapping a second time with the new bottom face.

[Uriah Eulenberg]

To close the bottom, select each 3 (for triangle face) or 4 (for quadrilateral face) vertices on bottom of the object, and hit F key.

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Thanks for the help Aquila and Uriah. Both of your posts helped with different things. I wanted to reply earlier but blender unwrapped my brain or something. :-) It turns out that the step I was missing was Solidify. That doubled my tris and upped the LI from .5 to .86. Acceptable but I want to learn best building practices from the start so I rebuilt using a different method. My ancient Roman baking tray is now solid and .5 LI. So some success even if my carefully planned out measurements didn't quite work. Thanks again.