UVMapping for painting texture (boat)

ecas

Hey guys

I did a simple boat model at work and I'm trying to make the UV for texturing
and I'm not sure what is the best way to do it.
I tried 2 options,
A - Side projection which give good result on the top part but the bottom part is stretch.
B - Side projection but I relax the UVs and nothing is stretch but the line are not straight which means it will be harder to paint.

If I would paint in Zbrush or other 3D painting, I would probably do the option B but since the painting will be at Photoshop I think I need to use option A and manually fix the bottom issue.
I would love to know how you guys approach those issues, maybe be there is a better way.

ecas

Hey, sorry for the bump but I could still use some advice on this,
do you have any other way to unwrap this?

peanut™

ecas, the best way to Uv this would be to not use projections but to unwrap it.

If you want further help, tell us what program you use.

DEElekgolo

Option B would be best to generally avoid distortion. Option A looks like a planar projection along its side. By "Harder to paint" I assume you mean things like getting the curvature of a stroke to follow the topology of the flattened mesh(like if you wanted to paint a seam along the rim or get planks to follow the surface. It all depends on how you unwrap it really. You can allow some kind of distortion to your mesh so that it can compliment the details of what is seen and not seen.

I don't know what software you use but you can "pin" certain points in the unwrap and relax the rest so that it may be easier to paint on and work with while minimizing distortion.
Here's a quick example:

This could work. But it really depends on the kind of details you want to paint onto it. There is also unwrapping it to adhere to the more simple topology that it is deriving from. You'll see some people do this with stuff like clothes and how they unwrap it as if it was a "box". That whole surface of the boat can be simplified to three "quads" and everything else is just intermediate.