it could get a little difficult with only five images per post, but i guess i can manage it.

we start with two primitives, a cylinder and a sphere and

how to unwrap these in a clever way suitable for pioneer (avoids smearing of the texture, resp, how to unfold them without texture islands)

i recommend to create a set or at least do this before you transform them in any kind of uv mapped cylinders or spheres.

this will make it far easier for you to work with them and you will keep the UV mapping for all siblings.

we start with a cylinder,

when we have created a cylinder usually all convergent vertices are joined or welded.

hoewever it is named, the body is soft, in this state we can't make a good unwrapping.

i suggest to mark one edge in "mesh edit mode" to split the edge or the corresponding vertices.

in blender it looks like this,

and ends after applying the modifier "split edges" in "object mode" in this,

that might all be named a little different in other programs, but i'm sure you will find something similar.

now you can start to unwrap the mesh, respectively to project the UV mapping on the cylinder.

mark first all polygons of the tube (the cylinder without the taps).

make sure you look from front at the cylinder and then select something like "unwrap cylinder from view", this might not exist in all programs.

(if you haven't a possibility to "unwrap from view", it get's a little more difficult, but still you can follow this idea. you choose then a "projection from view", therefore you won't need to split one edge but you will have to stretch each projected poly (quad) so all quads will be sized the same, but you won't need the next steps. but it's difficult at all without "unwrap from view")

let's assume you could use "unwrap from view", the unwrapped UV will look like this, you can see that all quads are sized the same (that's the benefit of a untransformed mesh) and that the unwrapping starts and ends where we splitted the edge.

now select only one half of the UV mapping and choose "mirror x"

next step will be to move the mirrored half over the unselected half.

(next post)

here we go, we move the mirrored half over the unmirrored unselected half.

it will look finally like this (and this is also what it will look like after a simple projection when you did it right and made all quads sized the same)

now we have nicely unwrapped cylinder which starts and ends at the chosen splitted edge, of course any texture will be mirrored on the half of the cylinder, but we have to respect this to avoid texture smearing on a softened body in pioneer.

finally you can select and project the taps simply from a top view, the final UV mapping will look like this.

after all you can join or weld the edge (without taps, you like to keep this "sharp" usually) again.

and you will have a smooth cylinder with a good UV mapping.

again i recommend to do this with every cylinder you need, make only one unwrapping per cylinder type (might be you like some with 16 vertices/sectors or some with 24, more or even less as 16), move the body aside or on a different layer.

make siblings (full copies incl. all data e.g. UV mapping) of the unwrapped cylinder and use only the siblings for your model.

you can also use later "Boolean Tools" or transform the mesh however you like, the UV will be kept.

textured it will look like this

or this if you strech the cylinder afterwards.

now a "easy" one <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

the sphere, (maybe easy)

after creating a UV sphere with as many longitudal and latitudal segments you like, select the "aequator" edge of the sphere in "edit mode" and mark it sharp.

apply the "edge split" modifier in "object mode", like you did that for the cylinder above.

now, change again to "mesh edit mode", and select one half of of the sphere, and use a "simple unwrapping"

(again, if you haven't "unwrap" in your modelling software, you can use also a simple projection from top, but the result will be a little different, but also you can scale all quads (polys) sized to their relative size on the object manually, a lot of work, but possible)

the resulting UV mapping of a unwrapped sphere slice looks like this (and again work with untransformed bodies, keep that in mind that a transformation of the mesh will make the unwrapping irregular up to impossible)

repeat this procedure for the other half of the sphere.

unfortunately, unwrapping is different for each half and you have to mirror the UV of one half and probably will have to rotate it a little to make them congruent.

weld or join the splitted vertices when the UV mapping of the slices is congruent.

same as for the cylinder make a "father" (or a mother?) for sphere types you like to use, copy them and use only the siblings for your model.

this saves a lot of repetive work and foremost grants a nice seamless textured sphere without any smeared texture for pioneer.

now we come to the interesting part, the mapping of a finished spaceship hull.

here you can work with "simple" projections from view (great, yeah! yippee!).

but really get used with welding and splitting of vertices or edges, make soft or sharp edges, creases or how ever it is named in your software (we could need a standard here MAX names it different as blender, and ancient z-modeler used the term crease).

i marked this as important because i remember this as one of the biggest hurdles, even when it sounds obvious for more experienced ones.

yet another important thing, which is a often disregarded fact, use single sided material, always!

it will help you keeping the proper normals, wrong normals i have seen on most beautiful CGI models, might be you don't need this for rendering, but for games models this is alpha and omega.

---

sidekick: you can still use z-modeler it's not a bad proggy, foremost easy to understand, imo ideal for beginners or people who state: "i don't need no gimmicks", my original "imperial courier" was made partwisely with it and my "Viper X" completely. wherefore UV mapping is difficult in z-modeler, very difficult compared to blender. however, i feel blender is the best choice of all, costs only a download and offers most, you only have to invest some time to understand the interface.

but there are countless tutorials on Youtube for blender.

i preferred "Ira Krakow's" tutorials, he explains it well for beginners, he usually won't forget that some are less experienced and this i always liked.

He had a forum, unfortunately it's closed, it was a good resource for blender and related problems.

he usually wasn't to proud to even answer a beginners question, maybe he was tired to answer often to the same Q's, could be, people are often to lazy to search in a forum for answers, i know this behave from myself.

but of course there are thousends of others, but really "Ira" covers most.

http://www.youtube.c...rakrakow/videos

---

phew...

back to the projection of a shiphull

i use my rotten "Adder" as example how to make useful projections which you can use to export to a UV map, as they are used for textures like it's descripted how to make them in i.e. "Decoy's" tutorials, as linked in the first post (what a complicated sentence).

what we see blelow is a already finished model, certain parts have different materials, the reason is i can join the meshes and split them later on according to the materials, saves a lot of work, also the three different materials will be used finally for this model to have different colors on the ship, it's not a must, but helpful to do so.

i already marked here the edges which have to be sharp, or which vertices should be split.

you will need this again to counteract to the smearing when you have texture islands and you will have for sure texture islands on a shiphull.

further since the model is finished and split to various meshes i will take only the front (or the mesh with material1) to explain the procedure.

of course apply the "split edges" before you do any of the following. it's even helpful to select linked vertices, respective the linked polys.

as first step we select simply the whole mesh, and use a view from top to project the UV from top.

it results in this

now we deselect all polygons which are in top view AND which are bordered by the sharp edges, this will be the texture islands borders also.

next step,

after a UV projection from the side it will look probably like this

because i didn't zoomed the vie in or out between both steps, i have achieved projections in the same size, that won't be the case always, but more later.

i recommend to move the UV mapping now off the centre to make space for the next mapping.

you don't have to assemble them like i did, because you will have to do this anyway before you export it to a bitmap.

let's assume you have mapped all parts of the hull, it might look now like this

now to grant you can workout a nice shiphull texture i recommend to make all projections sized the same.

this really helps to make cute looking paneling, where all panels and lines will have finally the same spacing or thickness.

you can see also that i arranged the mappings, so i can draw lines later through all parts and they will fit later perfectly.

certain parts, like the roundlets here, are sized bigger, this makes such parts look a little more detailed.

i recommend to export the mapping as a true lossless bitmap, i.e. for blender .tga (targa bitmap), choose a rather big size for the export of the uv mapping, i.e. 1024x1024 or even double.

this simply because to work on a big texture and size them down later makes far better results, no doubt.

you will have far less aliasing, to scale down is much better what any smoothing can achieve.

THAT'S IT SO FAR!

how to workout a texture in GIMP as example i will show later, now i'm really tired and need to relax.

This is really good Gernot keep them coming! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

<img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//crazy_pilot.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':crazypilot:' />

<img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//pilot.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':pilot:' />

Thanks Gernot! You always post stuff like this a few weeks before I'm ready for it. I'm going to download Blender and do some serious studying soon! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//biggrin.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':biggrin:' />

I'm in Corel3 yet. <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//sarcastic_hand.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':sarcastichand:' /> Using Gimp for textures?