Unwrapping spherical shapes

tesher07

Ok, so I'm not used to unwrapping sphere shaped object but for a mod I was working on unwrapping the low poly of the dome camera and now I'm stuck at unwrapping it. Can anyone please explain to me how to do it or give me a tutorial please? I'm not experienced with pelt or relax by any means. .







Also ps, I would also like it if someone could explain to me the easy way to overlay objects instead of welding them. I heard that layering 2 opposite uvws and welding them is bad when baking models and I heard there was a different way. So if anyone can please explain to me both things, I would be very greatful.

malcolm

For that particular sphere you have to decide where you want the seam. For something like the bulb you could planar map it from y or z if you're in max and then relax all the uv's except the border edge. Alternatively you could planar map it from the side this would give you more seams but potentially less uv stretching.

tesher07

Can you possibly create a few images to show what you mean? I'm not really good with relax tools or seams.

PhilipK

Well on what you have there is pretty nice since it's not a full sphere. I made a couple of examples. How you could go about mapping that.

It depends on how much texture space you wanna use versus stretching etc.
In the last example that'd work best if you got some sort of natural seam in the object. So the top "half spehere" was split up into 4 "plates".

And the bottom one would be kind of hard to map in any other way than the first. It really depends if you're gonna have a lot of detail on it that shouldn't be stretched. (I noticed now that I had a hole on the planar mapped relaxed one.. Of course you could map a full half sphere like that without any stretching what so ever).

And the relax in MAX is found in the unwrap window which you can see in the top pic.

Eric Chadwick

Some more info here
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryTextureCoordinates