I've seen many tutorials. I can do it. But I can't do it well. I have this ship. I want several sections to use the same area of the texture. This actually seems very hard to accomplish. Moving islands seems to turn them into squares. If I select a single poly, all the others get hidden and I can't use them for reference. So, how do pros do this? Other than by using the prohibitively expensive Max or Maya, which last time I used weren't as good as blender in this area but may be now. Are there some tools? Or does it just take a week or two per model to get the UVs right? I grabbed UVMapper, but I can't seem to even get it to unwrap a model let alone do anything of the things it claims it can do.

A week or two for UVs on a non-organic model is crazy. A hour or two maximum is how long it usually takes me and I'm not a pro.

Headus UV Layout is a good UV program, but you shouldn't need it for something like a ship.

You should be able to detach UV polys and snap them to the ones that are already matched up. A screen shot of your ship might help if you don't mind sharing it.

I'm at work atm so I don't have it, but I can assure you it's very squarish and simple (probably 200 polys max, can and probably will be reduced more as there are polys where they don't really need to be).

So you're saying that blender will snap uvs to other uvs for me? It's hard to tell what polys i'm working with sometimes when the unwrapper just spits out squares.

I added seams and they come out alright, but often blender likes to rotate the islands slightly. I think my main problem is currently that I have no matched up polys, as I'm still trying to maximise the layout so that I can export it and paint over it.

I just discovered the tool that tells me how much pixel stretching there is, that is awesome but of course now I forget where it was!

I don't actually use Blender. My advice might be useless. I had a quick look at Blender UV unwrapping and it does seem a bit primitive.

I'm not sure if Blender can snap UVs, but here's something you can try which may be useful as a substitute. Make an image of your UVs either thru Blender if it's capable of doing this or with the PrtScn button at 100% zoom. Line the UVs up over your texture in a paint program and save this as a new texture. Now load the new texture into Blender and you have a guide for placing your UVs. When you're done replace the guide texture with your old texture.

You can do something similar to find out how your UVs correspond to your model. Paint each -- I think the term you used was island (my program doesn't use that term) -- a different colour and see where Blender renders them.

I'm sure someone who uses Blender would be more helpful.

Quote: Original post by abstractionline
I don't actually use Blender. My advice might be useless. I had a quick look at Blender UV unwrapping and it does seem a bit primitive.

Blender is considered to have among the best UV tools in the business. They are the envy of many a max and maya user. There are many who import their models into Blender from other packages to UV them at this point. You just have to know how they work, and have the talent to use them.

UV mapping, like everything in the 3d modeler, is an art, and will take hours and hours of practice to master.

@BlitzWing Are you using pixel snapping on a small texture? Have you tried mirroring your model and only texturing one half? Try posting your model, and what kind of UV mapping you are trying to achieve.

Try at BlenderArtists.org's forum, you'll get more informed answers then you'll get here.

Quote: Original post by Daaark

Quote: Original post by abstractionline
I don't actually use Blender. My advice might be useless. I had a quick look at Blender UV unwrapping and it does seem a bit primitive.

Blender is considered to have among the best UV tools in the business. They are the envy of many a max and maya user. There are many who import their models into Blender from other packages to UV them at this point. You just have to know how they work, and have the talent to use them.

UV mapping, like everything in the 3d modeler, is an art, and will take hours and hours of practice to master.

@BlitzWing Are you using pixel snapping on a small texture? Have you tried mirroring your model and only texturing one half? Try posting your model, and what kind of UV mapping you are trying to achieve.

I guess I'm not using pixel snapping, or I probably would have noticed. The main problem I find is that most of the tutorials are for earlier versions of blender, and as you probably know, even 2.49a is different to b.

Do you know anything about moving islands turning to squares? Edit: I had Quads Constrained Rectangular on dammit! that's been causing me problems for weeks!

Quote: Try at BlenderArtists.org's forum, you'll get more informed answers then you'll get here.

That's a good point, I should have gone there first.

Here's a couple of quick and useful tips:

Select more than one vertex in the UV and hit the W key, then choose one of the options.

Using option(alt)-RMB in t he uv window will allow you to select a whole edge loop at once. This is especially useful if you have edge loops that are straight edges in the model.

Keep a 3D window open when you are working on the uv and have it in face select mode. Then you can select an island (up to the extents of the seam) by putting your mouse over one face in the model and hitting the L key.

Those are just some quick tips. UV unwrapping is a bit of art, logic, and voodoo all at once. But Blender beats hands down any other unwrapping tool I've used.

Scott

Great info guys, thanks a bunch. I'm much better at unwrapping than I was yesterday!