Unwrapping a spherical object

Simon_____

hi guys i was wondering if anyone knows a good way to unwrap a spherical with little to no distortion so i can use it in substance painter 2, i know about using a cube with mesh smooth/turbosmooth however this does not get the exact shape that i needed, any help or guides would be hugely appreciated 

engelmanna

Have you tried adding a spherify modifier to your Cube->Turbosmooth mesh? That has always worked great for me when I needed to create a sphere with fairly even quads all around.

If you UV your original cube as 6 shells (one for each face) before making it a sphere, you should end up with a fairly UV unwrap with minimal distortion. From there you can either stitch the subdivided shells together to remove some of the UV seams, or relax each of the islands to remove almost all UV distortion. 

Simon_____

hm i will have a go at doing that now thanks

cryrid

Is this the cockpit pod of a TIE craft? If so then there's going to be quite a few panels that might make for a good place to put some of the seams. 

ActionDawg

Add seams where the viewer is least likely to look, click quick peel, then use relax by polygon angles.

Check Area Distortion if you're on 2017 or newer. Add additional seams as needed to minimize distortion, but this should be a very simple unwrap. As long as you don't see bright red you're fine.

Simon_____

cryrid said:

Is this the cockpit pod of a TIE craft? If so then there's going to be quite a few panels that might make for a good place to put some of the seams. 

yes it is, however if it was a normal version unwrapping would be quite easy, but the version i am creating has quite a lot of custom decals and paint work, 

ok so heres a more completed version 


i was planing on putting the seam lines where these red lines are drawn, i should of probably of made further progress before worrying about the unwrap haha