Model UVW unwrapping questions/issues.

[Baelkin]

I'm just wondering what other, more experienced modellers do when unwrapping the skin of a model, and what workflow they normally would follow when doing new models for Fallout 3 / Oblivion. Especially when making items likes helmets and armour, where the angular seams of the model aren't very clear as they'd be on most guns and weapons.

 

Currently I'm at the last stage of unwrapping a model in 3ds Max 9, and I am getting completely bummed out due to the time it has taken me to get it done right - do you really have to do everything relatively manually (pick faces, pick map type, flatten, normalize, muck around with vertices until you go apeshit crazy etc.) or is there some magical trick I just haven't figured out yet? I can spend several hours on a single component to get it just right without too much distortion on the surface, almost spending as much time unwrapping the damn thing as I did making the mesh in the first place, and it's beginning to annoy me a lot. :(

 

My current production model, a mask on which you can see both the exterior and interior (doublesided as you need to see the inside of it once dropped on the ground ingame), has a total of 7.239 polys (which co-incidentally might be my problem, more polys means more unwrapping to do), so to me it feels like making a jigsaw puzzle with that many pieces without an image to follow (I need to make the skin later based on the UV, everything is custom) and the risk of it coming out "wonky" in the end. If anyone could point me in the direction of "good" unwrapping/modeling principles, with the intention of integrating a model into a game at a later stage, I'd appreciate it as figuring out everything on your own is getting a little frustrating.

 

So I'm wondering, am I just a dork at unwrapping and need more experience at it and perhaps the right tools, or does it just take that long to do a proper unwrap from scratch? :)

[jaysus]

depends on the complexity of your model... i usually split mine into parts of different material and try to use a simple box map for most... for some parts thats of course not appliable and youll have to manually map vertices

[Baelkin]

I guess it's easier to talk about this if I show you my model. :)

 

I think I know what you mean though, and I'd probably follow the same approach on a model with less corners and less angular polygon faces, where you don't have as many polys nearly perpendicular to each other. I'd probably also have been done by now if it wasn't "two faced" in the sense that I've needed to map both the inner and outer shell of the model. Normally when you make an armour or similar you don't really have to do that, as no-one will see the inside of it anyway.

 

I also have a lot of "rims" on the model (around the edges of the mask and so on), which all take a lot of time to straighten out to make a more "logical" texture map when I get as far as making the textures. Mind that the model on the attachments only show the right half of the model and is rendered using a somewhat older and less optimized version of the model - the version I'm currently unwrapping is symmetrical along the middle, forming a full mask and there's a few more elements added to it along with some smoothing here and there where needed, all adding more polys to the equation than what is seen on those two images.

 

Currently all the major parts are split up into sub-objects, with the goggles, outer shell, lining etc. having their own, separate UVW map as that'll allow me to make different versions of the item, using different parts "on the fly" at a later stage although it also means I'll have to use more groups in NifSkope when it comes to assembling it and more texture files to reference from the texture sets.

 

Hopefully it'll work out in the end, though I hope that the next items I plan on making will be easier to unwrap than this one. :D