UV Noob need your help! (Please)

[tukor]

Hi there!!

Im learning Uv unwrapping and… well… i cant understand it lol.
Im watching tutorials and all, but i cant figure out how it is working (using C4D).

i have this little piece, and not matter what i try, what seams i give it… If i give it a checkboard material the squares never align.
The entire piece will be visible in game.

Could you, please, tell me how should i unwrap this? (its only an example) How should i place the seams?¿ How would you do it?
So i can learn There is something im missing about this.

Thank you!

[ZacD]

How I would unwrap it, one seam on the edge loop around the inside bottom, one loop along one of the corners, preferably the least visible one.

There is going to be some distortion to the grid. If that is an issue, unwrap the top, bottom, inside and outside loops as separate pieces.

[ZacD]

Here’s a screen shot of those 2 options.

[SE_JonF]

You can also unfold the top surface uvs in a strip, if you want the texture to go along the flow of the shape. (i.e if you’re using a brushed detail normal or trims) Otherwise if it’s baked textures or something where the direction doesn’t necessarily matter, ZacD’s method would work fine.

[tukor]

First of all, thank you a lot for the help. You made those screenshots for me? You guys are amazing…
Really.

This is what im trying to do, and as you can see i always fail (its better now thanks to ZacD)

One of things im noticing is that C4D flow for Uvs is not very intuitive… at least for a noob like me.
I have a educational version of Maya wich im temptted to try.

As you can see in the screenshot i need what i think Se_JonG says.
The thing is, i have no idea what is “unfold the top surface uvs in a strip”, maybe because english is not my native language… or maybe because im a big noob

[SE_JonF]

I’m not familiar with C4D, but the principles for UVing should be similar across modeling packages. What you’d want to do is UV the top surface as you would a cylinder (which should wrap around the entire object). You’d likely get a straight line in your uv editor. You should then be able to unfold the UV vertically which would create a strip.

[kraid]

I did a quick modelling test for this object myself.

This is the Result:

Visualized with Pixelberg Realtime viewport shader directly in C4D.

For texturing i used shaders that were baked to texture:

Starting in the color channel with a fusion shader.
The source channel contains a yellowish noise for the yellow base color,
while the blend channel has an allmost black noise for the black stripes.
The mask channel is using a layer shader that combines a tile shader (set to lines)
with hard borders and one with soft borders with a noise that was clipped.
This causes the noise only to appear in the border areas.

The resulting shader is mapped flat onto the model and twisted 45°.
Using a 3D noise instead of a bitmap for the mask has some real advantages.
Allthough the material is mapped flat onto the mesh, the 3D shaders
still work independantly in all directions, so there’s no distortion of the noise.

I also did a quick normalmap by using biomekks edge shade, but it turns out that R18 is causing
some baking errors on the border pixels that lead to visible seams, so i did a quick highpoly to lowpoly bake.