Week 4

Brief 1, "Placeholder", commenced week 1 and was due week 3.

Brief 2, "Shippable", commenced this week and is due week 7.

Brief 3, "Staging", will commence week 8 and is due week 12.

A UV map is a flat representation of the surface of a 3D model, used for easily wrapping textures. A basic analogy would be a Kinder egg with its wrapping, with the wrapping being the surface of that egg—if you were to take off the wrapping and flatten it out, that's like unwrapping a 3D model's surface for texturing, and you can then draw on that wrapping and put it back onto the egg.

• The UV refers to the vertical and horizontal axes of the 2D space. It is essentally the same as X and Y in a 3D space, which is actually the reason why U and V was chosen instead of X and Y—to avoid confusion.

A UV Face is a single polygon surrounded by edges and vertices, whereas a UV shell is a single or collection of polygons that are grouped together in order to unwrap or texture a 3D model, and are surrounded by a seam.

Maya has an Auto Unwrap tool for automatically unwrapping your 3D model for texturing, but it isn't always foolproof. Sometimes you'll need to make some manual tweaks to the output, if not just do the entire thing manually to get the expected result.

• Other useful tools are Unfold, Straighten UVs and Optimize.