Need Help with UV Unwrapping in Blender

Endzeit

Hey guys,
i finished my first model,
the only thing that needs to be done is texturing.
But i stuck with UV Unwrapping and I need your help.







I tried several times to get a clean unwrap but i don't get it.
Searched for some tutorials but still stupid

How should i proceed and how would you unwrap this?

Lamoot

Could you show what kind of an unwrap you want? This way it would be easier to explain how to achieve it with Blender.

Dim

I would recommend adding a lot more cuts (at all of the parts on the cylinder that bump out). If this is a low-poly object however, I'd recommend A) reducing the polys, and using floating geometry instead of adding the extrusions along the shaft of the mace.

Snowfly

For starters, you could try unwrapping to several islands instead of trying to keep everything whole. It's pretty much impossible to unwrap a shape like that as one UV island without getting some nasty stretching.

kat

Read this if you're using 2.5 or read this if you're using 2.49 (or below)

Endzeit

Thanks for the fast answers.
I'm totally unexperienced with UV Unwrapping, i have no idea what a good UV is or not.
The Link is pretty good kat! Thanks, will try it today.

Lamoot

If you're that new to unwraping, perhaps this video tutorial should be helpful. As a bonus, the model in the video is somewhat similar to yours.

Endzeit

So i tried some hours but i still don't get why some parts are stretched.



This UV Layout is the raw one, unchanged by me.
The only thing changed is the size that is averaged automatically by blender,
but what didn't change the scale of the big parts.

Those red lines in wireframe mark where blender cuts for UV Unwrapping,
for people who don't know blender, i need to set them by hand.

I'm kinda confused because almost everything is stretched but isn't showed
in the UV Editor.
I asked myself now if there is a way to keep the overall size but reducing
the stretch so that no distortion rests.

Btw, the tutorial from BlenderCookie is nice but his model is more complex
and his UV Map is almost done without work :poly122:

I just don't understand why the UV of my model is so distorted, it's even simplier.

Snowfly

Could be that your scale isn't set to (1,1,1), really common pitfall. Select the cylinders that are unwrapping distorted, press Ctrl-A, select 'Scale'...then try unwrapping again.

Endzeit

Do you mean the cylinders in the Image Editor or in the 3D-View?

Snowfly

In 3D view. You basically want to kill any non-uniform scaling on your model before you start running the unwrap processes on it.

Endzeit

So i have a little progress, i rebuild the complete mace and the geometry is now clean
and structured like it should be. The only problem i have is the stretching again -.-
I tried your method snowfly but it didn't solve it.

The promised progress, the enhanced UV Layout and the "new" mace.

kat

Use Ctrl+A in OBJECT mode so it applies to the entire model. Also in the in the UV Calculation panel when editing the map, try using both to see which one give you the best unwrap as "Conformal" and "Angle Based" unwrap slightly differently on objects like that.

Lamoot

Or get your hands dirty and do some manual tweaking:
*Have a UV editor and 3d window visible side by side.
*In the UV editor make sure that "live transform" or something similar is enabled. This will cause any change in the UV editor to be visible in the 3d window on the fly.
*in the UV editor select the part with stretching, press S to scale, press Y to limit scaling along the vertical axis. Scale until you feel there is no more stretching shown in the 3d window.

ProperSquid

I'm not the best at uv mapping, but what you may want to do is lay some of the fan shapes on top of each other to give more space for other islands in the texture space. For the most part, you can rotate some of them 90 degrees, then turn on snap to vertex, and then just lay the pieces on to each other. Another benefit of this is that you can paint all of the pieces on one swoop.

Endzeit

Thanks you two.
I added some loops and the stretching was almost completely gone.
Tweaking manually is not an option it's necessary :P
No i tweak it by hand and it looks pretty good now
That's how it looks now.

Endzeit

So this is the result of 1 hour work <.<
Alas i'm not experienced with photoshop.
The next things i will do are making the other maps necessary for the model
and in the end i will redo everything properly and perhaps looking good :P

Endzeit

Hey people,
finished the mace so far.
But now i make a high poly sword.






I don't know how i could make the uv without wasting almost 512x256 pixel.
Should i seperate parts of the blade?

greetz
Endzeit