Hey, I am planning on making a HP model, but unlike a low poly model I feel like it would be hard to texture. Would it be best to just use materials without unwrapping it or what I was thinking is to unwrap the low poly before the turbosmooth. That way the uv's should match up.

Originally Posted by DarKMessiah34

unwrap the low poly before the turbosmooth. That way the uv's should match up.

You can definitely do that, but you'll have to be diligent about support edge placement so your UVs don't get messed up once you subdivide the model.

I personally always unwrap my base meshes before sculpting, just in case.

Zbrush has some handy plug-ins (UVMaster) that can make unwrapping a high poly model less painless.

You really don't need to worry about the UV's matching up on the high and the low poly, in the end you will be projecting the surface of the high poly onto the low poly and the UV's on the high poly don't matter at all, only what is on the surface and how it appears on the model.

I only ever auto unwrap the high poly and just block in colors in sculptris or 3dcoat, then I project that onto the low poly and continue texturing from there, so it depends on what you want to do.

I don't think that places dealing with rendering hi-poly models care a lot about the UVs and so use a lot of camera projections.

I even heard that some places are dropping photoshop totally and using programs like mari to texture as it's a lot quicker and easier.

http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/mari/

Oh yea doesn't the latest version of mudbox support Ptex? I'm not sure how they implemented that in mudbox but its a UV-less system or rather every faces gets a given number of textels that can be colored any way you want.

You can also try unwrap your model with UVLayout - it easily handles subd surfaces and performs distortionless unwrapping!

When I made my high poly models back in the day I unwrapped the low poly version before turbo smooth. This works pretty good, but you can't rely on edges to define flood colours like you would on a low poly model as the edges move. It's a bit tricky actually, I remember I had to take a uv snap shot of the low poly and the high poly wire frame to see what was going on when I was painting the textures in Photoshop.