In this last recipe, we are going to see how to export the UV coordinate layers outside Blender, in order to be used as a guide to paint textures inside any 2D image editing software.
We have seen that the Gidiosaurus object and also the Armor object have more than one UV coordinate layer, so the first thing to do is to be sure to have set the right layer as the active one.
To do this, simply click on the name of the chosen layer inside the UV Maps subpanel under the Object Data window; if you are in Edit Mode, by clicking on the different names, you can also see the different layers switch in real time in the UV/Image Editor window.
After you have selected the desired UV layer, do the following:
.blend file is saved, as the directory opens, at the bottom-left side of the screen is the Export UV Layout option panel where you can decide on several items: the size and format of the exported image, and the opacity of the islands (by default, for mysterious reasons, it is set to 25 percent rather than 100 percent). Moreover, you can decide if you want to export all the islands of the selected object or only the visible ones, and also if you want the modifiers applied to the islands (for example, the Subdivision Surface modifier).Note that if you want to export all the different tiles placed outside of the default U0/V0 tile space, as illustrated in the There's more… section of the Editing the UV islands recipe, at least for the moment, you have to temporarily (using Ctrl) move each island at a time to the default U0/V0 tile space and export it.