UVing a car

Philly13

Hi all, just been UVing a car at work and since I haven't had much experience in terms of UVing, was wondering if I could get some help. I'm trying to give it optimal UV's with the least seams possible. Here's a shot of the work so far:-





I've split the front, back and roof of the car from the body and tried to relax the UV's as I want to take pictures of the car and project them onto it. The issue is that the seams can cause stretching and distortion and I want to have clean UV's on the car to allow me to texture the lights on and small details,etc.
I'm also finding that I have to do a lot of painting out of artefacts and such, and I can help but think there must be a better way of doing this! It will be Iphone spec so I won't be using any material or rendering tricks. If there are any ways the UV can be improved, please let me know! Thanks for the help in advance

Eric Chadwick

Cars often use mirrored UVs since they're symmetrical. Logos can be placed with separate decals (a floating quad with alpha-test or -blend).

Google Images search for "car texture" will show you examples of other UV layouts.
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=car+texture

renderhjs

some tips:

• mirror anything you can, symmetrical mirrors are the most obvious ones.
• split the front shield window apart (as it has different smoothing groups anyway)
• straighten more lines so you can get more out of med - low resolution textures. Esspecially for technical stuff you want to have some pixels line up with the geometry and not rotate in texel space.