Final Major Project : NSX GT3 Evo - Update 07

Understanding UV's and their workflow has always been an area I've rushed through to save time in projects. I felt before that I had a good understanding of UV efficiency and layouts but the Miura project showed to me that this wasn't true. I realised I had to give UV's the respect they require, as they have such a huge effect on the texturing stage. I spent some time going back over the fundamentals of UV's and reading tutorials from here, as I knew this was something I had to improve on.

Below are the UV maps for the NSX. I put a lot of time into these and I'm hoping the results will pay off. I cut the seems to be where the smoothing groups needed to change (something I had previously not known was such an important factor). I'm confident that these UV's are significantly better than what I was producing before. They still need some work and hindsight always makes me consider different approaches, but trial and error is what helps me to learn and better understand a process.

This second UV set (below) is for the main bodywork. This one I'm the least confident about as it is having to account for an area I have never done before; creating a livery. To my understanding, and what I have heard from vehicle artists, the best thing to do is to lay out the pieces keeping them as structured to the original shape as possible. This means the UV's may not be as efficient but as you can see below the parts that will be covered in a livery are the correct orientation and layout in relation to the corresponding 3D piece.

I'm not convinced I've done this as well as I could but once I have seen the result from the texturing it will help me to understand where I could have further improved it.