HowTo:FullUnwrap1Intro

Okay, so you've read the other tutorials but still get frozen in front of the screen when it comes to unwrapping... Yes, it takes a lot of planning and preparation, and I'm still waiting for a half-decent automatic unwrap script. Whatever time automatic unwrappers save you in unwrapping, they take back 5-fold when it comes to texturing. Anyways, if you're like me, I hate oversimplified tutorials, like how to unwrap a cube. It tells me nothing about the actual work of unwrapping a whole ship. And too small a ship to unwrap would be similar to just a cube. You want to know how to unwrap a big, complex ship, right? You're in the right place now...

We're going to unwrap this baby:

By the way, if you haven't been introduced, this is the Cutter Class, a small capital ship --a corvette-- that I came up with for WCU's Wing Commander Zero project. We had a need for a corvette, but couldn't find any WC1 corvette other than the Venture Class, which is a lightweight, fast corvette for reconoissance. We needed a corvette that would make for a good transport and be able to serve as carrier escort --i.e.: be able to take some heat off the carrier and survive, rather than survive by running away.

One might ask "why 'Cutter'?" Well, no-good reason: Traditionally, a "cutter" is a light, sub-corvette size, fast ship. I was looking for a WC1 Confed corvette, and all I could find in the database was a cutter called the "Venture" class, mislabelled a "corvette". So I had to come up with a corvette, so might as well call it "Cutter"... Tit for Tat :D

Before we unwrap it, however, we're going to assign materials to it in Blender, and place lights we can bake onto the "glow map", so as to make our unwrapping and texturing work much easier later...

But not even that, yet. Step by step. First things first.

Ready?

• Next: Clean up the mesh