Need help with UV unwrap

Lemenus

Hello there.
I need need help with unwrapping my model. 
If i unwrap with seams like on image, there will be visible uv seams, even with tri-planar projection. (maybe it will be hard to see on color texture, but it visible on all lighting textures like normals or specs) (seams marked with red lines)

But without them uv island intersect with itself

How Should i unwrap it?
File of model included

Neox

you could easily stretch the polies on the intersection a bit to make some space for a gap between those 2 parts

Lemenus

Neox said:

you could easily stretch the polies on the intersection a bit to make some space for a gap between those 2 parts

Already tried, results are.. well, i'm not sure that this is okay. 

Maybe those distortions really subtle, but still, i want to make it look good, really good, like something that i can put into my portfolio

jakemoyo

Well is this the way Simon Fuchs went about unwrapping his? as far as the layout goes? I know its kind of lame to just outright copy him on something so minor but maybe it would be prudent to go look at what he did as far as the unwrapping/layout and see how your is different . Maybe that's where you will find your error.

Lemenus

jakemoyo said:

Well is this the way Simon Fuchs went about unwrapping his? as far as the layout goes? I know its kind of lame to just outright copy him on something so minor but maybe it would be prudent to go look at what he did as far as the unwrapping/layout and see how your is different . Maybe that's where you will find your error.

He did nothing special about it, his model simply have much more detail and variety of materials compare to mine, so in his case it's really easy to make unwrapping without seams being visible, I guess i can do something like that.

Looks like i have no choice, as i understand after watching countless amount of sites searching for answer - uv unwrapping nowadays still cannot fight with such flaw

ridger_drift

Lemenus said:

- uv unwrapping nowadays still cannot fight with such flaw

 If your model has errors to begin with then it will carry over to the unwrap and on towards the baking phase.  I don't know what exactly was going on with your mesh, but I took it into Modo and performed a mesh cleanup and weld verts before starting to re-bake and re-uv to see what would happen.  Either Modo does not like how your OBJ was generated or there were quite a few verts that needed to be welded.  In any case, I've attached the radio with new UVs and a 2K normal.

FBX and OBJ along with 2K normals attached if you want to take a look. 

ActionDawg

there should never be readily visible seams so long as:
• you split uvs where the normals are split
• uvs dont overlap, islands have good padding
• you have enough resolution and bit depth to accurately store the difference between the high and low poly normals.

and as a side note, models with lots of skew in the uvs or poor triangulation can make that last bullet point a lot worse


ignoring a couple little artifacts from making a 2 minute high poly, heres your model baked with a big ol invisible seam. all i did was give the islands padding.