How do I UV unwrap a low-poly bowl?

[sss1red]

I just don’t know how to UV unwrap this bowl for my low-poly game.

[thorn (BA Staff)]

That’s a rather simple object… have you not checked out the basics of how to unwrap UV?

Mark a couple of seams, and unwrap it. Lots of YouTube tutorials out there.

[sss1red]

Could it be like this?

[etn249]

Welcome!

How about simply putting a single seam along the outer rim? It’s the only way that avoids the seam being visible. Sure, it would cause a slight texture stretching, but I’m not convinced this would look so bad, at least not worse than a visible seam in the middle.

[sss1red]

I could do that, but I’m not sure how it will affect the pixel textures (about 256x256 pixels) that I’ll be creating.

[etn249]

Are you texturing in a pixel art style, where the pixels of the texture have to fit in a grid?

If you are, what you did works, though don’t be afraid to use more seams if you need them, as they won’t matter for that kind of texture.

[RSEhlers]

That would give you visible seams in your textures…
Something like this…

Unless it is Glass, in which case you don’t need UVs

[Renzatic (In Desperate Need Of A)]

That’s about how I’d unwrap it, though I’d give the edge of the bowl its own island to keep the curved surfaces from having any potential weird baking issues.

Though why did you remove those bottom portions?

[RSEhlers]

Get rid of the bottom pinching and add a flat bottom… which can be scaled to add an extra bit of thickness… once I change the textel density, it could also have a displaced brand name…but that is really taking it above and beyond…

I didn’t do the rim, since I figured it would be beveled anyway…

[CarlG]

I don’t need to unwrap for what I do, and I absolutely hate doing it. Just so you know where I’m coming from. But for something simple like this, my strategy would be to maximize the UV space utilization at the cost of stretching and texel density accuracy. So I:

• Placed some seams.
• UV/Reset on one quad, link select all (based on seam), follow quads.
• Repeat for all islands, 5 in this case.
• Did an average island scale, and a packing, to see how it did.
• Manually scaled islands and placed them around. Bottom rest is smaller.
• Decided to split out the ring into parts of two faces each.
• Ring parts then made taller to fill out the space.
• Baked out a noise based on object coordinates to check for problems.
  
  

Attached example. Older Blender version, so the source wood material which the bake is made from may not be identical on your end. For the wood bake, I made the island margins in the UV a bit bigger.

Bowl Unwrap and Bake.blend (282.7 KB)

[Hadriscus]

What is your texture like ?