What's the best use of texture space for a low poly character who's outfit is entirely symmetrical except for a belt that's at an angle? The belt doesn't have it's own geometry (which would trivialize the problem). Usually in the past I'd paint half the texture in photoshop, mirror it, then draw the odd object over the top of it, but that doesn't take advantage of any sort of uv mirroring, so I wanted to see if there are other options.
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Adding cuts as Mark said, will also work well if you can use additional tris. You can also mirror everything except the torso. What's the tri count and texture budget?
that arm is never going to animate properly if you dont fix that.
edit: upon further inspection you seem to have a lot of ngons.. mostly in thigh/knee/elbow areas
http://wiki.polycount.com/LimbTopology
Also if it's going to be a lot of large flat colors, you can condense a lot of polys down to just a few pixels of solid color, provided the scale relation between the UV shells isn't important for something else. That could free up enough space for a few unique bits.
I would cut the belt in so you can straighten the UV's and you aren't trying to deal with diagonal aliased lines.
Right now it's 450 tris (including head and hair with are both separate objects) - I don't have a budget necessarily, except that the body is going to be used for a lot of different characters, so I need a single UV layout that I can re-use.
Which, now that I think about it, means maybe I shouldn't mirror at all, because if any one character has asymmetrical parts, they'd require a separate geometry.
Actually, it looks like most of the character designs are pretty symmetrical with the exception of the hair (which is fine), and some belts/armor pieces, which could easily be separate geometry. The scabbard is going to be separate anyway. The camera's going to be pulled out so far that any momentary clipping won't be too noticeable.
Thanks for the advice, guys!