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Blender Basic Texturing

UV Stretch Heatmap

#Texturing#UVs#Review

Spot ugly UV distortion before it ruins your texture.

The Workflow

  1. Select your mesh and enter Edit Mode.
  2. Open the UV Editor and ensure the object is unwrapped (UUnwrap).
  3. In the UV Editor, enable Display Stretch (icon/menu: OverlaysStretch).
  4. Switch to Angle mode for most cases (or Area if you care about uniform texel area).
  5. Look for red/orange zones (stretched) and blue zones (compressed).
  6. Fix by adding seams, relaxing UVs (UVMinimize Stretch), or re-unwrapping problem islands.

The Usage

Stretch heatmaps reveal where your texture will smear or pixel-stretch. Catching this early saves hours of “why does my fabric look melted?” debugging—especially on faces, hands, and curved props.