as far as uv space goes. a simple top town uv map would be the fastest way, but if you come in atht egreebels from an angle, the sides of thim will always look flat or worse have ugly shear lines from being uv mapped at a prependicular angle. you could also apply cubical mapping, and if the uv tool youre using is smart enough, it should map each poly from the angle in which it has the most surface projected to the map. either way would be difficult if you use anything more complex than a generic metal texture, like mapping lights to the insides of the grebels.
for example the truss structure on the ragnarok class
which really isnt greebeling, rather its just a reverse-extruded pattern id say those alone took about 2 days to uv map. it was enough to push the model to the sweetspot of 15k polies and about 11k of those were for the hull. now had i just done a top down on them, id have all sorts of defects on the uv mapping, i essentially wanted the insides of theese to look like steel beams so that means i had to map each surface to the same spot on the uv map.
now for the second example you showed it looks like that sort of effect would binifit from the top-down mapping, completely ignoring the sides. now it your first pic, that wouldnt work, youd want to texture the sides of those. either way the work involved is
more than anyone but somone who gets paid to do this stuff can do in a resonable amount of time. if i was getting paid to mod im sure id come up with much better stuff. id guestimate it would take hundreds of man hours to uv map something as complicated as a super star destroyer.
