When your model(s) are done, it’s time to UV unwrap to begin the texturing process.
Texel density refers to how many pixels per metre of texture resolution a mesh is provided. In general, Restockalike parts aim for a resolution of 200-300px/m, whereas Nertea’s other mods (such as CryoEngines) can go much higher, in the region of about 350px/m.
Use Texel Density Checker to check and rescale UV islands to match desired texel density.
It’s recommended that for simple conical or cylindrical objects, the UV map should be straightened a la an equirectangular projection. You can of course let the UV unwrap do its thing, but it’ll make actually creating the colour textures much easier if you’re just working with a rectangle rather than a strange distorted shape.
Using Blender’s cylinder project works okay in a pinch in producing squared-off maps. Here a boattail is unwrapped, first by centering the cursor, then switching to an orthographic view before the operation is executed:
However, it is still limited in a few ways, chiefly how it tends to still distort faces and represent them out-of-proportion on the map.
A better way is to first UV unwrap with project from view, select an active face that’s fairly proportional and squared-off, and use follow active quads. The benefit of this approach is not only are faces more proportionally scaled, but it also works to “flatten out” other faces not normally mapped with the cylinder project mode. Here, a boattail is unwrapped, and the top and bottom faces are also included in the map when using this technique:
A similar technique can be used for the circular planes of meshes. Here, a mounting ring is projected from view; a face is then squared off, and with that face selected as active, follow active quads is usd to convert the circular UV map into a rectangular strip:
The technique of squaring off maps also means a tremendous amount of space is saved on the UV map, allowing for denser packing of art assets and therefore a more optimised asset.
Spheres are quite similar to using cylinder project. Again, remember to centre the cursor and switch your viewport to an orthogonal view first:
This isn’t necessary, but it can help a lot in terms of creating your texture art. In Blender, select all the meshes of the same part, and press Tab to go into edit mode. In the UV Editor, select all the parts of the UV Map. Go to the top menu, and find UV➡️Export UV Layout.
If you bring the exported file into your image program and set its blending mode to something like Multiply, you’ll find that you now have a reference overlay for your texture creation process.