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...

...

(Last step: Align vertices near x=0 to x=0, apply X-axis mirroring, and place the central seam.)