Unable to unwrap this shape

khela

Hi, i'm very new to Maya and i'm unable to unwrap this:



I should unwrap this in planar or automatic mode?

Thank in advance

musashidan

It's essentially just a cylindrical unwrap. You could break off the caps(or leave one edge attached on each), cut a seam down the length and unwrap. Or you could planar unwrap it from 4 sides(plus the caps). Depends what you're doing with the mesh: baking a Normal map?

khela

Yes normal map. Based on your suggestion i have created 2 planar projections for the caps and a cylindrical one for the rest of the shape, And i have got this result:
There is some "bad things" or something like that?

nasty1

There is texture stretching going on. You gotta relax your uvs. you usually want all the squares on your checker map to be the same size and proportional.

peanut™

This should be of good practice for beginners. You could always post the file and have some people Unwrap for you. By interacting with others you will grow.

musashidan

There are several things to bear in mind when unwrapping, both generally and specifically for game assets:

Even texel density with minimum distortion(across both assets and uv shells) - squares on checker maps consistently sized, square, and with no(or as little as possible) warping/distortion

UV space maximised to ensure greater texture resolution

Seams hidden in places that they won't be obvious. Not a problem if painting textures in 3D.

And for baking normal maps there are a few important factors:

will you bake with split UV shells/smoothing groups for hard edges? Or will you bake it synced with fewer shells?(or in some cases a single shell)

Straightening certain uv shell border edges can be important

Having shell directions facing the same can be important(so that the numbers on your UV texture face the same way)

These are all things that you will only really come to understand yourself by practicing, testing, and trying out different methods.