HowTo:FullUnwrap6Seams2
Placing Seams (Part 2)
With the seaming up of the towers, it seems to me we've done well over half the seaming up work, so I decided to break the rest into a separate wiki page; --and because it was taking me forever to scroll to the bottom every time I saved changes :D
So, what remains is pretty much just the "greebles". The biggest greebles are the legs. Legs?! Yeah. This ship has legs; didn't you notice? Not for landing, but rather for boarding other ships. Anyways, the rear legs are larger than the front ones, so we'll start with them. They are mostly split, smoothing group -wise, but not enough... If I select one of the outer polys and Ctrl-L, we see that one smooth group is too non-flat:
I wish all problems were so easy to solve...
Proceeding to the front end of it...
This piece is a prime candidate for unwrap from bottom view (top is already split; so are sides), except the front-facing part, so we seam it off:
The magnetic shoe is fully split, except the outer rim...
That's because the outer rim can so shade smoothly and give the impression of being round, from a distance. Of course, smooth shading can fool no one at close range...
...but this is just a little greeble, anyways; and splitting the 8 sides would increase the number of vertices in the mesh too much for what it's worth. But, coming back to our present mission: How do we unwrap it? We coul place one seam and unroll it with Cylinder unwrap, but that would give us a long strip we might not know where to place. Or we could unsplit the sides from the top; but that would give us smooth shading with the top. What I think I'll do is leave the sides split from the top, but unwrap them together from top view; then pin the top edge vertices, and LSCM. So, nothing to do.
The piston will take a bit more work...
Here's a faster and easier way to hide any materials other than the piece you're interested in:
- Select a single face of the thing you want to isolate
- Click the question mark icon in the materials panel in the F9 panel. This shows the material of your selection.
- Now click on the Select button, below and to the left
- Press Shift-H (to hide NON-selected stuff
- Press A to turn off the selection
BINGO
The top facing and bottom facing rings are already split. All we need is a seam line to unroll the round things cylindrically.
The square base is all split, of course. I've just changed my mind about the material for the piston, though... Two things I don't like: The part where it joins to the leg is made of a different material (can't remember which), but the leg is "stainless". I think the material of the force bearing parts should be the same as the leg. Number two, the telescopic parts should be a lighter and more matte material than my "titanium". Why? Because I don't like to see environmental reflections in pieces that are surrounded by other pieces that should show on the reflections but won't. So it should be matte; but at the same time, it's so hidden and dark in there that I almost can't see the pistons at all, so a light material is in order. I have one material that's perfect for this: "Matte White".
Much better.
The front legs are a bit more complicated... First let's look at the smoothing groups by clicking on one facet at a time and Ctrl-L-ing:
Simple solution for top and bottom unwraps from view:
We'll do the same thing with the magnetic shoes at the front as with the ones at the back --i.e.: nothing to do.
Alright, let's tackle the hoses...
The hoses are going to be HARD to unwrap. Well, we could just cut them in half horizontally and LSCM them, but I don't want to do that; because I want to put corrugations in the bump map; and if I cut the hoses in half it will be very hard to match the corrugations on the two sides. And my corrugations will be either like rings or like a spiral, and that would be hard to do unless the hoses are straightened out. So, I want the hoses straight and in one piece, and the only way I know to do that is the painful way: vertex by vertex, pretty much. So, I'm going to put just one seam running along each hose. The best place to have the seam, of course, is where it's least visible: The underside. But even trying to do that doesn't immediately appear to be easy...
Which, of all those lines, is the one at the lowest point, for each of the hoses? :-/
I'm often having to come up with new Blender tricks, and this is an example. This is what I just came up with and will do:
- Set the view to orthogonal, from above, transparent mode
- Set edge selection mode
- Alt-right click then Shift-Alt-right click 4 times in each hose's middle line
- Ctrl-E -> Mark Seam
- Then select and remove the 6 outer seams withe Ctrl-E -> Clear Seam
Why 4 times? Because I have hoses for the top and bottom engines, and each hose has top and bottom edges overlapping.
Okay, so, 1) Set the view to orthogonal, from above, transparent mode
Shift-Alt-right-click 4 times in the middle line of each hose,
Ctrl-E -> Mark Seam; then we can rotate the perspective a bit to verify we got 12 seams...
Two seams in each hose, --top and bottom...
Now, select the seams we don't want only:
And remove them with Ctrl-E -> Clear Seam.
Done! Well, don't forget the other 3 hoses, bottom engine.
I feel we're getting to the bottom of this thing...
The ring...
First of all, what is it? Well, I put it there with the thought that it would telescope out, during a boarding operation, and serve as a pressurized port the marines use to invade the target ship. And what I think I will add to it in the texture is some cutting laser and stuff.
But, how do we unwrap it? I think that from bottom view it will be fine. We could pin down the dark rim and LSCM the rest; but even without LSCM it might be fine... Being that it telescopes out, vertical stretching of the texture might actually look pretty good.
...
(Last step: Align vertices near x=0 to x=0, apply X-axis mirroring, and place the central seam.)
