UV Unwrapping - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 115

Finally, I unwrapped the finger-
nails and teeth onto the same
layout, fitting them into the
remaining gaps between the
other islands.
For the eyes, I unwrapped
only the inner mesh simply by
positioning the 3D Viewport to
look at the eye straight on and
using the Project from View
(Bounds) operator. Later on,
I will tweak the UVs of the eye
mesh to fit the texture I will
paint for it. See Chapter 11 for
more on unwrapping and textur-
ing the eyes.

unwrapping the
Jungle Temple
The Jungle Temple had many
separate elements, and rather
than go through them all, I'll
just cover the most difficult
ones. (The objects in the Jungle
Temple not discussed below
are simply unwrapped using
variations on the techniques
discussed earlier.)

Figure 8-7: The final UV layout for the Bat Creature's body

Stone Blocks
There were an awful lot of stone blocks in the
Jungle Temple, so I didn't want to have to texture
each individually. Instead, I wanted to be able to
unwrap them all relatively quickly and reuse the
same textures for each. My quick and dirty solution
was to use the Select Sharp operator in Edit mode to
select the sharp edges of the blocks (Select 4 Sharp
Edges from the 3D Viewport header) and then
mark them as seams (see Figure 8-8). Next, I used
the Unwrap operator to unwrap all the blocks at
once. I manually removed some seams in areas like
the damaged stone and at the edges of some blocks
where I wanted the texture to wrap around rather
than having an obvious seam. I only placed seams
manually on the blocks in the scene's foreground,
and I unwrapped these manually to make sure they
unwrapped nicely.

Trees
In the case of the trees, I added seams down their
backs (the sides facing away from the camera) and
around the joins between the trunk and the roots.
I then unwrapped them using Unwrap. Next, I
selected a string of vertices in the UV Image edi-
tor that ran down the middle of the root or trunk,
aligned it with the vertical axis, and pinned it.
Unwrapping again gave me nicely aligned UV
islands.
The technique described above is useful when
unwrapping something like tree bark that has a
texture with a strong grain or directional pattern
because all of the pieces will align with the direction
of the grain. I packed both trees into the same UV
space (see Figure 8-9) to allow me to texture them
both at the same time later on.