Help with UV-mapping dolphin

Mossum

Hi guys!
I hope someone can help me with this. 
What is the best way to UV-map this model? 

It is a low poly model of a dolphin-like creature and needs to be unwrapped in a way that makes it easy to handpaint the textures. I am at the end of my project and need to unwrap my models before I leave, and then other designers will take care of the texture painting. The thing here is that the designers are not used to texturing 3D models, so they need to be as easy as possible to paint. Also, the customer wants a lot of patterns, so I think it would be good to avoid separating the uv map in the middle of the model. Although I am afraid that's necessary at some point since the textures should be power of two, right? 
and it would be bad to have a texture with only a small parts used for the texture. I could also uv-map the model in a diagonal, but I have heard that that is also something to avoid. 

I only need to uv-map half of the model though, since I mirror it in the export. 

Any help is very appreciated! Thanks!

Alex_J

When I do creatures, I usually unwrap them the way a hunter would skin them. Slice along the belly, cut off the appendages or split them with a perpendicular, intersecting line to the main belly split, and unfold. 

This makes the whole thing pretty readable if you are painting in 2d, but it also puts your seams in the most innocuous places as well.

But definitely check out artstation and see what other people are doing. I think a lot of people do it something like this, but I haven't looked at a ton of lower-poly, hand painted style critters so maybe that can be done different and better.

Mark Dygert

Yea the classic pelt map seems like it would work pretty well, but a planar map from the side will do the job too. It won't really fit onto a square texture that well so you might as well unwrap both sides and let them paint unique details on both sides.

Either way, you might need to separate the fins into their own unique space so it relaxes well and doesn't distort them. But really, it might be ok to leave them all joined.

The texture of a dolphin isn't a noisy pattern so it will hide distortion well.

They shouldn't have too difficult of a time either way, it's not a terribly complex material to paint, some grey swirls and streaks mixed with a mostly white-ish underbelly. Unless you really try to screw up the UVs its probably going to be fine.

They might have an easier time painting textures on the model like in Substance Painter, 3D Coat, even photoshop has some fairly decent-ish 3D painting.

Mossum

@Mark Dygert @BIGTIMEMASTER Thank you both for your answers! UV-mapping like you said worked very well! I feel kind of stupid that I didn't think about using the extra texture space to actually unwrap both sides, but sometimes you just doesn't think about the obvious things :P 

I just want to make it as easy as possible, even though this is an easy piece to texture because those who will texture are one, not a designer and the other are a student which studies UX. So not really their area normally. but it will work well I think! Thank you guys for your help!