Best way to unwrap this model?

obloquy

Hey, I'm making a string vest (pic 1) and was wondering if anyone could give some advice on the best way to unwrap it to get a decent amount of texture info on it when it comes to painting as it'll be seen sort of mid close up.   I've added panel loops to give it thickness so its split into 3 polygroups - front/back/middle (pic2).  I'm aiming for a wool texture on it like pic 3 which will probably be an alpha in zbrush.

I could do a quick zbrush UV Unwrap based on polygroups which would be fine but then the pixel info would be way too small when I brought it into Substance painter for example as it would be the front and back as two big flat pieces crammed into the uv space.... Or is it best to cut up the entire thing into tiny pieces?  Any advice is very appreciated

Alex_J

does it really need thickness? If you reduced it to a plane you could do a planar map and be done.

Can it be baked into normal map detail onto whatever is beneath it? Maybe bake an alpha with it so you can just use an ordinary t-shirt shaped mesh?

If I had to keep it like you've got and unwrap it, I'd probably start with planar map of both sides, then assembly line it by grabbing each individual diamonds faces, create shell from faces, and then stack all those shells on top of eachother. Tedious but may only take ten mintues if you get your assembly line set up smartly.

musashidan

Unwrapping a mesh like that to bake is madness. You'll never get decent res from a single uv tile.

Go with bigtimemaster's advice and use a regular mesh as your lowpoly and use a tiling opacity and normal map. No need to bake anything.