Hello Polycount community, I'm pretty new to the forums and world of 3D. Especially unwrapping and texturing I was practicing unwrapping of different shapes and came across a problem. I've used planar map for the top and bottom so that is pretty easy, then I tried using cylindrical projection which I thought would work fine but as it seems cylindrical projection does not work very well on angled surfaces. As you can see it obviously has stretching etc. How would you go about unwrapping the cylindrical bit in the middle? This might be a very simple solution but I'm fairly new to unwrapping



Thanks in advance for any help,
Gshot

Select the UVs along the top of that UV island and scale them inwards.

JMYoung, thanks for your help. I've tried your suggestion but it creates really bad stretching. Also, I might be using this kind of a shape as a roof in a castle project I'm planning. So I would use a tiling roof texture. What is the best way to unwrap this in that case?

I don't know if it's the best way to do this but you can Relax the UVs.

To relax the UVs go to Tools-Relax(you can try putting the Amount to 1 and "Relax by face angles").You might get seams,but I think it will remove the strecthing.

Tell me if it works,I haven't tested it.

I would try doing a planer projection from the top view, so it looks like a donut, see if that works.

This mainly depends on how you want to texture it.
You might want to keep parallel lines for an easier texturing with a straight pattern, so JMYoung's solution, or ZacD (i think there wud be a lot of stretching there), or might want less stretching, more constant pixel ratio, then Thunderent's solution.

mmh take look at this thread !
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=61005

I'm not sure indeed that a tiled texture is the best answer for that kind of object, because obviously, the relax is the best way to have no stretching, but again, it depends of what you wan t to achieve.

Originally Posted by ZacD

I would try doing a planer projection from the top view, so it looks like a donut, see if that works.

This would be my suggestion too. Planar map and relax it. This sort of shape is going to be hard to do without distortion. This sort of thing comes down to either (a) easy to texture but distorted or (b) less distortion but a pain to texture. Choose. :-/

Lots of possibilities as mentioned. Here's another one that might work for what you want to achieve.

Add a few more divisions and overlay the uv shells for each section of the roof on the same tiling texture. This way you can get the benefit of a tiling texture(nice texel density), and also make sure there's minimal stretching since you can scale each uv shell in a bit to match the shape of the mesh.

In some cases just planar mapping from the top will work well. In others you can cylindrical map and relax to end up with more of a half circle. That would allow unique detail on the texture and minimal stretching, but may take longer to create the texture and you'll lose texel density. Really depends on what exactly you're trying to achieve visually, whether the texture will be re-used on other shapes(you could have some flat roofs and some conical roofs using the same tiled texture, for example).

Just some more stuff to think about.