UV Mapping

The Unwrapping

After entirely finishing the mesh, the next course of action was to unwrap every single part of my model, using a checkerboard pattern to ensure that each projection was corrent and not blurred in the slightest. Throughout the previous tasks, i found this to be a rather awkward task, forcing me to spend hours moving around UVs after making each projection just to ensure that no edges were stretched.

This time around, i decided to firly straighten out the angle of any and all of the cylinders within the model, making it far easier to map them directly from the x,y or z axis and to ensure that each projected face was put directly in to scale the second  it was projected, i altered the projection width and height of every face to 100. With oddly angled faces, i still had to tweak the UVs slightly but due ot everything being practically the same scale, i was able to 'Move and sew' the vast majrotiy of faces togather without deforming the UVs, speeding up the entire process greatly whilist also giving overall better results.

After mapping of all these pieces out, it was time to play what is the largest and most awkward game of tetris possible; organising all of the components within the set 1024 UV space. I was able to overlap a lot of mirrors faces due to the symetrical nature of the vehicle which allowed me to have a much high resolution for each area but this has left me with some awkwar semes that i must fill during the texturing stages.

All in all, i think this has turned out quite well. There are some areas that i wish i had sclaed up slightly in comparison to others but the end result should look quite nice if i use every pixel allocated to me. As you can see on the model itself, i may be using a 512 checkerboard which makes the resolution look much lower but throughout the entire model, i cannot find even a single stretched UV.

Once the UVs have be signed off, i should be able to jump straight in to texturing and due to the duplicate faces, it should overall take far less time to fully texture the overall mesh in comparison to other non-symetrical models.