Hullo all

Attached is an image Im working on for a friend.

Im trying to figure out an effective unwrapping strategy for the sucker and, probably where Im still not very familiar with the techiques involved, Im having a devil of a time figuring it out.

So any help from the vets here would be appreciated.

You could ask in the UVMapper forum where UVDan hangs out.

The initial strategy is probably to map each of the four "pods" and the body seperately.

I suspect dealing with all the greeble is going to make mapping tricky and tedious.

The Unwrap (smart projections) option should give good results for this model.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this. Company is gearing up for a charity golf tourny.

Lisa do you have a link to a tutorial abotu smart projections? When I tried it I got a mishmash of verts.

and Thanks NR. If smart projections doesnt get me anywhere I may try that.

No, I don't have any links to smart projection tutorials, never had much luck finding any good ones.

A larger number in the angle field produces fewer islands and smaller numbers produce more islands and consequently more seams but it is fast. Using projection painting in conjunction with the UV (smart Projections) should get you finished texturing pretty quick with good results.

If you are wanting to do detailed textures with asymetric painted details then you'll probably be better off at this point using manual seam creation and unwrapping which is covered in the wiki as well as I could explain it.

If you want to manually unwrap but have mirroed textures on the pods you can unwrap the front pods and rear pods and stack the islands then use the alignment tool in the UV editor to straighten and align the stacked islandss. Doing it that way will leave you with three major sections instead of five, helps when texture space is an issue.

If you absolutely get stuck on this unwrapping thing send me the .blend or the .obj and I'll do  quick unwraps using the various methods then send them  back with notes so you can see how it all works.