How to solve this UV issue?

3Dash

Hello, bit of a noob question but lets say you have symmetrical sides on a mesh that you want to share the same texture and reduce the UV space it is taking up, but as you can see my problem is that I can't just overlap it, so not sure on what to do

Any help is much appreciated, thanks

ghaztehschmexeh

Flip it?

Deadly Nightshade

You flip one of the shells and then you stack them.

And if you want some unique area on the flipped shell (like say, you want the text to NOT be inverted) then you just tear off that/those face(s) and give them unique UV space.

(For quick-stacking shells you can use my UV editor - it has lots of neat features that's not in Maya by default)

Zocky

With geometry simple as that, i'd probably just uv map one part, then duplicate and position the other half properly...sounds complicated maybe, but it's really doesn't take much time....

But there are probably even better ways, but that's always one possibility that doesn't really that much time...

3Dash

thanks for the responses

so here is my UV's with no overlapping



here are my UV's with overlapping



for this example I just put a simple label on it, works fine this side



wrong way round this side



I think I understand what you are saying Deadly Nightshade, so I would take the shells that the label is on and have it own UV space?

Deadly Nightshade

Cut out (on the mesh) the label on the inverted side. Select the shell and flip it over.

I always do this with rectangular labels but if it had a circular shape, I would make the cut square and send off that UV shell somewhere else on the map.

It's a balancing act. You are trading a higher polycount for a more optimized UV space (something I almost always prefer - that way the texel resolution can be aa high as possible). And the second good thing about it is that you minimize the amount of jagged shells. Straight shells are much easier to pack. Better packing: higher resolution on the texels in the end.