How would you unwrap this?

wilson66

I have a large model that uses, at least in a lot of places, kitbashing elements. There are lots of small and medium sized separate geometry parts that were (probably) exported from some CAD application using some automatic nurbs to polygons functionality (supposedly). In all tris, of course.

I need to UV those elements.

I'm going crazy here. There are lots and lots of those elements of all shapes and sizes, and the geometry looks like what is seen on the attached screenshot. Its a nightmare.

Automatic placement of seams doesn't really work, I was hoping to create seams based on angles, but since there are so many, and distorted, polygons, this doesn't work well. It places seams all over the place, fixing those would probably take longer than placing them all manually in the first place.

I would like to avoid placing all the seams manually, as this would take ages to do. It might not work any other way though...

How would you go about this? 

Alex_J

You retopo it as simple as possible. Determine which details are necessary to exist in the lo poly geo. The rest gets baked.

Any repeating elements you bake once and duplicate afterwards.

3d does take ages. Just got to get used to that.

Neox

this is why i am not a fan of working in individual steps without the next step in mind. "shortcutting" the highpoly phase without keeping making the low in mind will kick whoever follows up next in the balls. Lowpolies made without UVs and Textures in mind, the same thing. This asset would be pretty simple to model in a way that the basemesh can work as a lowpoly, either directly or with very little modifications, but thats stuff you or the person working before you should consider.

thomasp

I'd convert the model to quads first. That should be doable with tools like they can be found in Blender, etc. Surely won't work in one piece but you can make it work via selections of smaller chunks and working from one area to the next.

Then placing seams and unwrapping will be a lot easier and from the looks of it it would also take care of some shading issues caused by uneven vertex placements.

This isn't about retopo, right? Just unwrapping.

TriGon_

As the others said you want to do a proper retopo before thinking about baking this. First make a general blockout of the low (A) this will bake down fine and will look good from a bit of distance. If you need it to look better from close you can decide to start cutting in the paneling following your high, on the blockout low you made.