How to properly unwraps UV's on chamfered polygons?

Moutrave

Hey all,

Feeling pretty dumb right now but I need some advice regarding the UV unwrapping of chamfered objects like the one I posted below.





On this I've applied a cylindrical mapping then tweaked the UV's size manually but there's some waving still...I've tried flattening the UV's by material Id as well but in the results, the chamfered element were being separated from the rest and shown as circle...didn't imagine having to stitch all that. Is there an efficient way to do this ? I'm using max right now, but I hears that some tools like roadkill or texTools could be useful as well?

Any tips would be great, I seem to always be struggling with these type of shapes (and uv's in general but I guess that's another story !:)

Cheers

Brygelsmack

I would just planar map it from the side, pick an edge loop where I want the seam and unfold horizontally and then vertically. That's the workflow I have in Maya anyways. Should work fine unless you have a capped bottom (in which case I would just map that face separately from the top).

Can you show your current UVs btw?

Moutrave

Planara mapping fro mthe side, hadn't thought of it I've never worked the seams manually though, but I guess I'll have to learn how to manage them one day though ! I've give it a look, thanks for the tip !

my UV's currently look like that (I heard there was an option in older Max version to resize / make non-straight sides planar but haven't found it)

Brygelsmack

That's pretty much how I expect the UVs to look like.

Moutrave

that's what i thought too but the waviness on the checker pattern looks strange, at least to my quasi noob eyes...but maybe it's ok !

Quack!

It is wavy because you straightened the vertical edges. If you were to unwrap this true to its shape and relax, it would form a 'C' shape.

With that said, why did you model those small details in? Are you using normal maps? If you are using normal maps then modeling in small shapes and details like this is a waste of resources.

Moutrave

I will be using normals map, actually I'm trying to get into Zbrush and I saw a tutorial stating that it's good to prep the mesh for zbrush by chamfering and adding support geometry ...so I figured i would do that...but I probably should have made the UVs before because now I feel like it's all gone wrong.

But usually I would just have done a low poly, then I would have just created a normal by hand in photoshop and that's it...trying new things and having hard times I guess