HowTo:FullUnwrap8Potato
"Starting Big" in Potato Mode
This may seem like a big contradiction, but I'll begin the work by using an automatic unwrapper: Archi's. Why? Because I've had the horrible experience before of apparently being finished with an unwrap, but some tiny polygon somewhere in the mesh is not yet unwrapped, by default unwraps across the entire UV screen, yet there's no simple way I know of to find where on the mesh it comes from. So, I'd rather start working from a fully unwrapped mesh, even if the quality of the unwrapping is for the birds...
It also helps to have an automatic unwrap saved somewhere as a reference for relative sizes of islands. And to make the islands more easily identifiable, we'll do more than just save this automatically made layout, but we'll also bake a texture from it. Then, if you have a color printer, make a printout and keep it handy. Our real unwrap will look completely different from the above horror, but you never know what questions the printout might help answer at some time or other. But keep in mind that Archy does its own breakup of the mesh into UV islands; i.e.: It does NOT respect your marked seams.
If you're in doubt about the horribleness of the above layout, please refer back to the "Think Hard" chapter, where I listed the requirements for a "good UV layout", --maybe print it out--, and then go point by point and see how the layout above meets, or fails to meet, those requirements. (Hint: there's only two requirements it meets, out of that list of 14.)
(to be continued)
