Maya AR15 UV help

Doctore

Hello all, I haven't been doing this for long so I decided to take on a personal project over the holidays since I had down time in school. I am currently stuck on how to lay out my UV's for this AR15 that Im working on. Ive been messing with it for a while and each time I think I have it, I get a new headache and more questions to ask than answers. The mesh is separated into different pieces for all the vital parts but can easily be combined as you all may know. My questions are as followed,

1) Should I try to UV the weapon as one whole item or individual pieces by how I made them
2) what would be the best method for UVing this sort of object? Iv heard bad things about the automatic UV option but then I was told to use it and what about planar mapping?
3) Not sure what else to ask but Id appreciate all the help that you guys can provide. :thumbup:

THANKS AGAIN GUYS/GIRLS

Doctore

and sorry if I don't know where this belongs.

SlappyBag

You really want to have the whole texture on one UV sheet really and in order to do that you should be able to attach the elements together into one model and UV that. You can always split the model later and all the uvs will still match up.

Automatic UVing is fairly useless but can be a great starting point in order to visualize the rest of the process. Usually you want to split into UV islands that will make it easiest to texture, so splitting by material types based on the structure of the model is one of the ways.

Best way to learn to UV is to texture the UVs you make and learn where things went write or wrong.

I'd post links to tutorials but I'm writing this on my phone as I'm away for yee olde Christmas. Post up your progress!

Doctore

Ok so basically I can UV objects in parts to simplify the process then put them all together in the 0 to 1 space in order to lay them out. UV's have always been the most confusing part of the workflow for me so Im trying to get the best possible understanding of it and I really can't seem to find a good enough tutorial due to the nature of my model and all the different turns it has. Thank you for your help though, it did help simplify my mode of thinking a bit.

BobtheGreatII

Generally how I do it is I split the pieces apart that I want to UV. Then I UV each one, dragging them to a random place in the UV pallet. Once I've UV'd everything, I attach them all together again, and start organizing the UV's. The only drawback I've found is that you have to spend a lot of time re-sizing things, but it's the fastest way that I've found so far.

Edit: Note, that's in 3Ds Max, might be a little harder (or easier lol) in Maya.

Doctore

yeah, the best way that Ive found to do it as a newb is to planar map every thing using the camera angle option and just taking it a side at a time. It's taking me for ever but at least I can understand what it is that I am messing with. My one issue is that after going through and checker boarding everything, I realized that I don't plan to do textures on every part of the rifle, just some larger areas. It's good practice but very time consuming in deed. Been on it for about 4 hours and haven't gotten much done due to my inexperience.