UV Unwrapping - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 118

Figure 8-11: UV coordinates for the various leaf objects. Most were unwrapped to share the same UV coordinates.

Leaves and Grass
Flat meshes with open edges are particularly easy to
unwrap because you don't have to mark any seams.
I simply used Unwrap on all the leaves in my scene,
unwrapping them all to share the same UV space
(see Figure 8-11). This excludes the IvyGen leaves,
which were automatically unwrapped by the IvyGen
add-on already. For the cylindrical elements, such as
the stems of the grass, I marked
seams as needed, unwrapped one
face (making sure it unwrapped
as a rectangle), and then selected
the rest of the mesh ( ctrl -L) and
unwrapped using Follow Active
Quads.

The Rest of the Elements
The other elements in the Jungle Temple scene
were all pretty straightforward and followed the
same strategies used so far. Some elements, like the
water, didn't need UV textures because they will use
entirely procedural materials instead. (Chapter 9
will deal with creating procedural materials that
don't require textures, such as water and glass.)

Statue
For the statue mesh, I marked
seams by hand around all the
major parts and unwrapped
using the Unwrap operator.
Figure 8-12 shows the results. You
could try using Smart Unwrap,
and you might get what you need
for a mesh like this, but unwrap-
ping by hand will always give you
more control.

Figure 8-12: The statue UVs, unwrapped and packed into the UV grid