UV Unwrapping - Nissan Skyline GT-R

This week's 3D modeling sessions were dedicated to learning the fundamentals of UV unwrapping and applying textures to completed 3D models, a valuable skill in the games development pipeline.

The 3D model we were assigned to unwrap was a car provided by a former Gateway student who made the model for their university course.

So I began to dissect the model based on what parts would be either have a different look or different material. selecting the faces of the model that I thought should be separated, I broke the faces in UV editor before analyzing what had been separated and needed welding back together. Welding works with both vertices and edges and is used to tell the program where the seams start and finish so that when it comes to compiling the unwrap in time for texturing, there isn't any imperfections or distortions that ruin the model.

Having separated and welded every single poly that needed welding, I used the quick peel tool to scale all my polys in the UV editor to ensure that when packaged, there are no noticeable changes in quality where some textures appear more stretch and distorted. When packaged, it separated out all the faces based on how I'd grouped them which, whilst working efficiently caused some smaller details to appear quite fragmented, the spoiler being an example of this because of how many sharp edges it had.

A key improvement that I believe could be made is speed, seeing as it took nearly the whole week to fully UV unwrap the car which left no time to apply actual textures or materials to the surface of the model.