Techniques for lining up textures?

[Nealius]

The biggest frustration for me with skinning is having all the parts split up and scattered all over the place, making it a royal pain to line up camouflage patterns. Are there any techniques to line things up with minimal pain?

[Grimes]

If the wireframe mesh is part of the template I tend to rely on that for lining stuff up because it should be fairly accurate and if the modeler is awesome they will have vertices of touching objects match as close as possible. Otherwise I tend to just place a bunch of rectangles each with a unique color and fixed width on the two parts of the texture that are "touching". I then proceed to line them up accordingly through trial and error. It also gives you a good idea if one side has a reversed relation to the other. And I just work from there. Admittedly its more annoying to work with the more textures there are. Makes ya wish you could load up the model and textures and paint on it in real time to see how changes occur.

[Nealius]

It looks like the official templates have the mesh, but unfortunately there's no official template for the Su-25A so I'm working with a third-party template. The textures are a total mess with flaps/ailerons separated from the wings, and about three different fuselage sections. It amazes me how the original artists made these.

[gospadin]

multiple fuselage sections are essential for minimizing panel stretching, which significantly complicates adding livery details etc.

 

That being said, UV unwrapping is very time consuming to do well. I salute everyone who is good at it.

[joey45]

That being said, UV unwrapping is very time consuming to do well. I salute everyone who is good at it.

 

And have the Patience...;)

[gospadin]

And have the Patience...;)

 

or a good supply of drugs.

[jocko417]

I've had mixed results with extra strength adult aspirin...