After creating my models I went ahead and started to clean up my model by deleting any faces of a polygon that wouldn’t be seen from the outside! Making sure to check f deleting any certain faces would have an adverse affect on the look of the model.
UV Unwrapping:
When it came to unwrapping my models I simply just started by selecting a piece of my model and having my checkerboard selected so I could see how my texture would be affected by the UV, in most cases unwrapping my was fairly simple, in the case of small cylindrical objects I’d just take the square UV that was given to me and flatten it out a bit to make sure that wasn’t very much distortion there, a lot of other cases are just as simple as creating a planar map for my model, creating a cut along the side of the object using the edge tool, then unfolding it, again making sure there wasn’t any distortion, however there was a few points where I’d have a complication, an example being the platform part right below the floating orb, when try to unwrap that it wouldn’t work with me no matter what I did I tried using a planar map and unwrapping, then a spherical map and messing around with that to see if it would get rid of the distortion, however nothing seemed to work until I realized all the distortion was coming from the divot I creating in the top of the sphere. From there all I had to do was make a cut around the edges at the top, this left me with two different maps, the first was a circular map for the divot at the top, which left me with the second map. For that all I had to do was create a cylindrical map, and then unfold that map, for good measure to help prevent distortions at the bottom of the object I also flattened out the bottom part of the map and unfolded vertically as well as horizontally.
When I was happy with all of my unwrapping I then went and grouped my model together, deleted the history of the model and used the layout tool to even out the space between all the UV parts, however I knew I’d want to try and paint some textures directly onto the model so I decided to re-organised the UV layout manually based on which object the UV’s belonged to and where the object was located in the overall model
Further adjustments:
After getting my UV’s done I had my one on one talk with Alec, during which he told me that overall the work I did was fine, however he also gave me some very helpful advice about how I should layout my models and how to better combine my UV’s together. So after which I went back to cut and re-sew some of my UV’s together in order to help best use space in the UV editor. After doing all of this however I had to use the layout tool again, meaning that I’d have to go back and manually organize the layout of my UV’s again. Overall unwrapping my UV’s wasn’t as hard as I originally thought it would be
