[Ulala]

This is looking really great. Keep it up, BroByron!

[Ziame]

Bryon, you are really the master. I always love how you stay high-poly yet close to the original.


awesomesauce

[BrotherBryon]

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I've imported the model into Blender, fixed all the mesh problems I could find, and reapplied smoothing. I've attached a zip file containing the model in blender, .3ds and dae formats. Again I'm not sure how well the Blender exporter works for .3ds and dae formats so please use at your own discretion. Please let me if you find any problems with the mesh so I can make any corrections needed. Thank you and enjoy.

I may attempt to UV map it once I've become more proficient at it if some one else hasn't already done so.

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[Snail]

Someone get this man a medal.

[Commander Zane]

Superb!

[Droid803]

\o/ IT LIVES!

[Mongoose]

Holy awesome model revival, Batman!

[Thaeris]

Someone get this man a medal.

That, and an FSU badge.

[Mobius]

Please UV map it.

[c914]

If there will be UV map i could texture it 

[Galemp]

There already IS a UV Map and texture. Use the layout on the existing texture.

[BrotherBryon]

If there will be UV map i could texture it 

I'll give it a try and see how far I can get.

[BrotherBryon]

OK, I've gotten most of the pieces unwrapped with exception of the missile tubes. Not really sure how to approach those just yet. I was wondering if any of the more experienced Blender UV mappers would be willing to take a look at what I've gotten done so far and let me know whether or not I'm on the right course. As long as it has taken to get this far I would hate to take it much farther only to have to start over if I went about this horridly wrong. Any tips or constructive criticism is welcome. WIP UV model is attached.

[BrotherBryon]

Sorry for the double post but I've finished completely unwrapping the thing and laying it all out. Though I'm not really happy with how I had to unwrap the missile tubes but it was the only way I could find that wouldn't get all stretched out. Never done much of this before so any advice as to how to improve the lay out and or unwrapping process would be appreciated. If everyone is fine with it I believe all that would be left is to export the UV face layout to .tga or what ever else is needed for some one to texture this thing with.



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[c914]

First of all, create a texture with grid ( something like this http://www.g-3d.com/images/textureGrid_1k.jpg) ans see how it covers model with uv mpap you've create. Most important thing here is create a uv map in which the various elements of the model (eg wings) will be one part, without any gaps between parts of those elements.

[Rga_Noris]

Also note that its okay to have a little stretch. If you haven't found it yet, in the UV editor you can go to View->View Properties->Click 'UV Stretch' and it will show you how much distortion is present. Dark blue = no distortion, Red = Highly distorted.

C914 UV'ed the Cain and it is one of the best texture jobs I've seen, yet its UV has plenty of green areas (somewhat stretched) areas in the UV view. Same with the Hatty.

[BrotherBryon]

So I'm taking that it's better to have less islands even if it some what streches the texture and to keep things in bigger continueous pieces. I've been going about this wrong way and will need to start over. On the plus side I now know exactly where those few remaining mesh errors are so I can take care of them before hand unless blender some how has a way of clearing all the unwrapped islands and seams. Surprisingly UVing is good way of finding extra faces and segmented edges. So if I am reading all this right I don't want to break all the recesses into seperate islands but keep them all part of the same island and maybe tweak the vertices of the UV map once they are unwrapped to try to minimize larger stretching.

[Raven2001]

So I'm taking that it's better to have less islands even if it some what streches the texture and to keep things in bigger continueous pieces.

It kind of depends really. I think that in this case, you could try UVing it over the original texture (so yeah recesses and etc would have stretches)

On other cases, you might find that you don't want stretching on certain parts (and thus, you'll have to have more UV islands), or that stretching could be helpful for certain texture effects.
With experience you'll be able to identify the cases easily

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Indeed, with the lack of texturers in the community, it does make sense to use an existing map, even though that has all kinds of limitations...

[BrotherBryon]

Better? Tweaking the UV for the missile tubes has been a real chore and I'm still not all that happy with them but it's getting about as close as I think I can make them. I did have to use a few more islands than the original texture due to overlap, just no escaping it. Let me know what you all think.



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