Need a hand unwrapping an object

DaveVoyles

Hello all,

I'm still pretty new to 3D modeling, but have been doing pretty well so far in regards to learning.

I'm having difficulty unwrapping a simple piece of geometry, however. I'm making a cog (I guess that's what you'd call it), but am not sure of how to go about laying out the UVs. The top and bottom are complete, but the cylinder itself is presenting a problem.

If you were to unwrap it, what would be your procss? I've included some pictures so that you can see where I stand. I've created other models before, but get frustrated when I get caught up on somewhat simple items.

ericdigital

Just cut the indents out from the sides so they are their own UV island and then you can lay out the main body as one big nice rectangle and the top and bottom as their own islands.

ZacD

How I did it,
1. Apply a cylinder unwrap
2. Planar map both the top and the bottom
3. delete all but 1 inset, uv mapped that by itself (the top right piece on my UV)
4. duplicate the piece around the mesh.
5. merge and done

DaveVoyles

Thank you very much guys for the quick response, I appreciate it!

DaveVoyles

"3. delete all but 1 inset, uv mapped that by itself (the top right piece on my UV)
4. duplicate the piece around the mesh."

I'm confused as to how I duplicate that around the mesh. Would I use something like the symmetry modifier?

ZacD

How I did it, I had the mesh original mesh centered around 0,0,0, I extracted the part that needed duplicating, I used 0,0,0 as the pivot point, and just rotated around there with rotational snapping.

DaveVoyles

Worked like a charm.

You've been a huge help, thank you again!

MagnificentMicrowave

That map is using 50% of its texture at most. It's entirely possible to do a unique, straight unwrap with the same texel density without even changing the texture size. Attachment related.

MattQ86

At the very least you could move the uvs for the first two duplicated indents down a bit before repeating and get some variety to the texture.

dfacto

For a simple shape like that you could also consider just mirroring everything so that you only texture a 1/4 slice of the cog. That would give you more texture space, but depending on what you want to do with it it might not be the best choice.