[3D] How to unwrap spherical Visor so texture doesn't distort?

LuizHD

So I'm having a difficult time making this specific texture wrap around the visor. I've tried quite a few ways of relaxing the the UVs, but nothing I do seems to work. Triplanar also looks too broken because of the type of tileable texture I'm using.

Does anyone know how to make the UV work with this hexagonal texture?

Noren

I'd probably try to drastically reduce the polycount of that element (reproject it later if necessary) so you can manipulate it with greater ease to get a bit more even texture flow, or use soft selections and pinning along with relaxing (or combine both approaches) to get the best possible outcome, but there will be some distortion either way.
Also, the horizontal hard edge is not a good choice in combination with that kind of patter if you ask me. You'd have to have the pattern run through this exactly following the direction of the edge (and "halving" every other hexagon) to make it look good, or scale the pattern down a lot so it doesn't create as much of a problem as it doesn't compete with it on the same detail level.
Inserting an arch/border along that edge, splitting your pattern, would give you a lot less headaches. Think about how this would be built in the real world.

A much more complicated, but perhaps worthwhile approach would be to model the pattern in 3d or at least create the initial distribution by hand by placing the center points of your hexagons on your mesh so they result in a hex pattern that's as regular as possible, and use that as guides for your mesh or texture somehow. Maybe you could do something with Voronoi with the centers as starting points. Not sure how clean or perfect the result would be, though.
There are scripts that turn quad meshes with two-directional flow into hexagons, but then you'd run into the same distortions you are struggling with right now. 

You could also morph this into a flat  state (e.g. taken from the UVs) to have an easier time working on it and skin the 3D cells to the flat mesh and morph the whole thing back. But like said, that's quite convoluted.