[CMDR Duckenheart]

Is anyone using blender that can give advice on texturing? Specifically, I'm having trouble with the UV unwrapping process. I have no idea how to get my UVs coming out ready for texturing. They either come out a jumbled mess or a bunch of squares, which makes it hard for me to visualize what should go where. I know marking the seams is supposed to help with that, but how do I know where to put these seams? Every time I try to mark them my UVs still come out as a mess. I saw one video that seems to explain it way better than any video I've ever seen, but I'm still having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around it.

It's so frustrating because it feels like I "almost" get it, but I'm missing something that's still stopping me from doing this effectively.

Anyway, here's the video I mentioned. Maybe someone can help me bridge the gap? I can unwrap a cylinder or pyramid just fine but when I try to do anything more complicated than that I get lost again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS6B5PAzlWI

[wookieejedi]

RoyalSkies does good fast videos for overviews and refreshers, but they are not the best for learning a topic like UVing IMO. I'd recommend watching Blender Gurr's UV videos, Grant Abbot, and/or CG Cookie's videos on UV texturing. How I learned was repetition and practice, watching videos multiple times, practicing a lot, and then doing that cycle again with the same videos, then trying it with different videos.

[EatThePath]

Mark seems that divide the object into sections to allow any continuous details to hopefully not have to cross any seems, upwrap, find the most ugly island, mark/unmark some seems you hope will fix it, repeat until you are sick of it done.  Honestly Wookie is right, as you go you'll learn what shapes on a mesh are troublesome and how best to approach them through lots of experimentation.

And yeah, I love Royal's videos as a direct and to the point map of how to get something done, but I think they're most useful when you have a general idea what you need to do and need a guide to how to make it happen in Blender. He does do some teaching of concepts and such in places, but the format is best for demoing workflow I think. Besides him I have gotten a lot out of Josh Gambrell's hard surface modeling videos, and he's recently posted one on unwrapping, but he deals a lot in heavy use of booleans, making high and poly meshes for baking details, and that kind of thing, which may not be suitable to what you're doing. Hell, I've yet to finish a ship since my own recent plunge back into 3d so I'm not ever sure it's suitable to what I'm doing yet