Ok, I FINALLY found some motivation to get the UV's laid out, I actually started working on a new model but I have had a few peeps asking for me to texture my dreadnought. It's took alot of time and alot of discussion with a friend of mine and it is still on going, we are having a bit of a dispute as to how detailed I should go, as we are both texture beginners we thought I should come here and get some advice. Apologies for the sizes of the images that follow I didn't want any blurring or pixelation by due to comperssion.



This is the main body laid out, my mate pointed out that it looked like what automatic mapping would do, but most of that was planar mapped, admittedly I could have laid them out better, he also asked why I didn't seem most of it together, for instance the 2 edges specified by the arrows, well........ if I did this, I would have a load of UV's overlapping as shown below



Also sew everything? Given the angles that some of the edges are at, it is harder to draw the lines in photoshop and they would go off in all angels as shown below



So I explained by laying them out the way I did, if I ever want some panelling that goes round the model all I have to do is, in Photoshop, copy what was in the green square in the first image, rotate it anticlockwise and paste it near the second edge and its a simple matter of lining it up correctly. in hind sight I could have laid them out with the shells as near as paossible to each other as follows



Then all I would have to do is either move the UV's slightly up or down, or move that part of the texture in PS.

Another thing discussed was how much detail I could fit on any one part of the model, you can see by the following layout that parts of the model are extremely small.



So when in PS and you zoom in it would look something like this



Now with this I would struggle to get any serious detail in there, but as these are extremely small parts of the model during any sort of movie they wouldn't be noticed and they will only have basic texturing on them. The only way past this that I can see would be to have all these parts of the model in there own UV spaces as follows



But then I would end up with a shed load of shaders.

When I create the snapshot I created them at 4083 x 4083 with 72dpi,



I upped the dpi in PS from the standard 72dpi to about 300dpi,



so now I can get that finer detail, but the file res ends up like 17013 x 17013 and file size of 829mb, lol, so I binned that idea.

So far there are 17 shaders, the main body, body detail (pipe entry points ect), the smoke launcher, the concrete slab on the front of the body, the hips, L leg, R leg, 7 weapons, all the pipes and finally all the metal (pistons and ammo pipes).

So in short, would I be best having all these little model details and extrusions in their own UV space? Ending up with possibly hundreds of shaders.

What resolution and dpi should I snapshot and should I alter it in PS?

Any comments and advice would be appreciated.

Thx
Mick