Unwarp odd hardsurface shapes.

Udjani

How do you rather unwarp those kind of shapes? as continuous as possible or would be better to cut it to have small and easy shapes to fit the uv layout?

Like here with those big flat shapes, the green lines are seam to illustrate what i mean by cutting them in smaller parts.

poopipe

split it where there are sharp angles - there's less potential for artefacts that way, 

zachagreg

Echoing what poopipe said, cut at sharp angles avoid cutting across the face like that, the reason being is that the is a good chance you will get these dark lines across your nice hard surface. Those large faces are the ones that are supposed to be taking up the large portions of your UV anyways so youll just have to work with packing to get your UVs efficiently placed. 

Mark Dygert

You might want to re think the surface design a bit, there are some big contiguous pieces that ramble all over the model. The places where you've outlined in green are roughly where an industrial designer would put breaks to help with the manufacturing and maintenance process.  You can also incorporate that into your design and get some natural places to hide your seams.

Ask yourself
How would this be built?

How are they going to manufacture the pieces, stamped, forged or machined metal? Formed composites and plastics? Are there weak points that will break easily or make manufacturing difficult?

How would these pieces be attached? Is there a frame that it gets mounted to? How is it mounted? Clips? Screws? Glue?

How would they pull this apart to do maintenance? 

You don't need greeble for details sake, that always looks fake and noisy, but thinking about function will solve a lot of the same issues that we face.

Udjani

Mark Dygert said:

I agree, i could have made a extra effort so that it would make more sense, but i thought that the concept was cool and decided to just go with it.