Uv unwrapping and Texturing.

Unwrapping and texturing are two different processes.

Also without seeing the example or model first hand it's impossible to say what or how you should go about unwrapping, whether you will bake from low poly to high or just use low poly. The standard practice is to have separate UV shells where you have hard edges (from experience modeling hard-surface objects), and minimize island stretching. In the example.: the more you see red - the more stretched the UV shell is. You can also check for stretching using checker maps.

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Straight edges also bake much better than angular ones (less artifacts),



shading plays important role too. All these things later combine into 'good' or 'poor' bake and the result is output of the texture quality.

It also depends on the object itself, whether it's simple and you can texture it using only Photoshop or whether you will need other programs like Substance Painter.

(Marmoset for Bake , Substance for texturing).

(Substance Painter, layers WIP texturing).

For most efficient Unwrapping you can even delete parts of the object that you will 'mirror' so that you can only keep one side of the UV shell to maximize texel density and move other to other UV space.

In most cases you can unwrap object starting from Camera projection and just cutting where the seams should be and unfolding them. Again all depends on object and it's complexity.

I check my comment again I sent the link for the file.

Hey. Sorry for late reply haven't been online in a while.

Your model is incorrect for UV's. It is technically possible to create UV's for such model but it's super inconvenient and the results will turn into poor textures. It's also bad practice for your future projects where more complexity is involved.


It should also have limited amount of polygons, the quantity determined by complexity of shape. General purpose of 3D modeling is to create and define shapes for your object. Details are usually baked from high poly or created during texturing process.

Now when you have such model it is only then you worry about unwrapping. And in this case unwrapping is simple, I just used Camera projection view and cut mesh into slices where I put hard edges.

You can see it in images bellow.:

Then I just straightened some of the edges for better 'bake'. Obviously this can be optimized better, but I'm just showing it for illustration purposes. You can see some stretching, but it shouldn't play too much of an important role.

For baking purposes it's also a bit better if there is some gaps between UV shells. You can re-scale and adjust the UV shells for that, but that's how they should look like technically.

Here is the file, in case you want to see how your model and UV's should look like.:

easyupload.io/7yfg4c