HowTo:FullUnwrapBlender
Full ship unwrap
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.
Ready?
If you work like I do, you probably have one or two dozen objects spread through half a dozen layers. For unwrapping we'll have to put it all back together in one piece. Well, two pieces really:
- The big parts
- The tiny parts
How big? How tiny?
The tiny parts are those parts so tiny we don't even care to texture them. In this case, all the hand-rails and ladders. What? You can't see them? Well, you shouldn't be able to see them. Let me get a close up shot. Hold on...
