I've never fully understood UVW Unwrapping in 3DS Max. I went on a 3 year university course on Games Design and I was never really taught anything. Anyway, not going to get too wound up about that now if you guys can help me

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/593/milkfloat.jpg/

I've created an abandoned milk float and the only thing left to do is unwrap it.

The issue I'm having now (and one I always have) is with the unwrapping. I've tried Planar unwrapping the front of the cabin and I've selected it all like this

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/214/72521884.jpg/

Once I select Planar it flattens it all out like it should. The problem I'm having is things to extrude out at an angle are being overlapped.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/844/97234099.jpg/

It's probably quite difficult to see in that so I'm going to try to explain it as easily as possible with images.

The first image is the underside of the lip selected in the main window and the edit uvw window

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/404/47505625.jpg/

The second is the thin edge selected

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/823/98799446.jpg/

And the third is the top part

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/84/46197262.jpg/

Hopefully you can see that the UVs are overlapping each other....hopefully?

I've tried relax which sort of works but it's not straight and things are still overlapping

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/543/43249927.jpg/

Hopefully I've explain it enough for you guys to guide me on what to do. It's one of the few things I've really had issues with in Max and I hope you guys can finally help me with this, spent many hours staring at my PC because of it.

Thanks in advance.

wow wow wow wow wow wow wow... OK now the healing can begin.

First off i see what your talking about. you need to realize you don't have map everything all at once, you can do little individual pieces at a time. good start with the front of the bus and planar mapping it because its pretty flat. What you should do now is select the faces of that little "trim/overhang" piece and the unwrap that with BOX mapping, it should be an option on the right hand side in the Unwrap UVW modifier. This way you make them a separate UV island of their own. Don't be afraid to make UV seems. I would separate the head lights, the sign above, the windshield wiper, and maybe the bumper.

If i were you I would head over to eat3d and really think about buying some of their DVD's... Start with http://eat3d.com/pillar It covers the entire process of making a high quality game asset. including unwrapping. good luck

The trouble with that dvd is it's using 3DS Max 2008. Would I be missing out on anything new? Or are the later versions of Max just more refined UIs with better performance?

if it is useful:
http://vimeo.com/30757635

Originally Posted by street89

The trouble with that dvd is it's using 3DS Max 2008. Would I be missing out on anything new? Or are the later versions of Max just more refined UIs with better performance?

Well not really what you miss is the basics of uv unwrapping, and that dvd and other tutorials on the web cover that very well

Could be smart to take a look at this, although quite old it still applies.
http://waylon-art.com/uvw_tutorial/uvwtut_01.html

thanks guys

- for more technical models, quick planar mapping, relaxing, and stitching is usually the way i start things.
- try to keep your uv edges as straight as possible at the cost of some stretching, this will downres better and save you uv space.
- i tend to group uv shells 'logically', so the guns's optics would go in one corner and so on. - put a checker map on your model to check for even texel distribution. afterwards you can still scale down areas that won't be seen as much in-game to free up texture space for the rest.
- i usually don't limit myself to 0-1 space at first, once i start puzzling the shells together i just take care to 'anchor' them to one corner of the 0/1 square so i can scale them all down into 0/1 (if that makes any sense).
- don't be afraid to mirror things, just move them out of 0/1 space by exactly 1 unit before you bake etc
- mind your padding. i usually keep around 10 - 12 pixels of space between my shells at a 2k resolution, when the texture is scaled down and mips out, this should eliminate the worst bleeding effects. a 2k texture filled with 10x10 px squares is helpful to check your padding.