How to split the UV of a complex mechanical or character 3D model?
Like this one. It is composed of many scattered parts. Do I need to disassemble UV for every screw or wire?
For example, such a game character model. With many details and different materials, how do I decompose UV?
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You CAN create uvs for every thing, but the thing is it depends...
like in the first picture i would create uvs for the shoulder plate but not for the tiny screws and notch in the middle.
to display "tiny details" you would need a normal map you create from the highpoly mesh.
You have to decide what the resolution of each texture will be, you can create uvs per materials (iron leather cloth) or per "equipment" (glove, iron-parts on the glove, fur), but keep in mind that not all materials have the same shader, like cloth-shader, skin-shader.
Important parts need more love. But i would go with a fast pass for everything.
And have in mind if its for a game only the lowpoly needs uvs.
If you have a beast of a PC and do not think you need to learn proper uv layouts since you will probably apply for texture artist / ?general 3D artist positions? You could do the quick lazy method of just clicking unwrap all <- for the low poly version and letting zbrush do all the work for you then fix any issues you dislike on a test texture you slap on to see how things will look or what gives you problems.
Make the textures 8k res and profit, (leaving the time to properly learn u'v's to another artist in the pipeline, though hopefully at some point learning it down the road, results faster, pieces faster, your choice, do what you think is best..)
I have yet to tackle a realism character with that much detail so i have no knowledge of how best to work that out. I did my wattedge robot by hand in 1 shot i made the uv's i think i posted the uv work but if not (to lazy to check) here is an example of what that might look like, took a while.
2048 was the final results but i "tried to use techniques" to fake a higher looking res (dust patterns). For curiosity users, this is about 94% utilisaztion of the uv layout substance says. (recall memory not exact.)
This is using a Squaring off approach with a properly sorted axis constraint (all layouts are readable with similar resolution.) Example of what i mean here:
The squares inside the squares are not stretched and the alphabet and numbers are all readable. ^ Really good checker map, helps me greatly. Entire model follows like this example object (which are his gluttes) if you want to see the entire model like this i can post it. Hope it helps you.