Need help unwrapping a Sorcerer hat

I am trying to get a clean unwrap of a sorcerers hat I modeled. I get it unwrapped however I can’t seem to keep the texture from stretching. It is a cone shape and havent been able to find any documentation on the web as to the best way to unwrap a cone. Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Have you made seams? You could experiment with selecting the edges along the vertical line in the back and marking them as a seam, and them the circle that is the join between the brim and the cone and mark that as well. Then unwrapping might be easier?

Yeah I made seams. What I am trying to do is decal images around that hat. I can’t seem to get it not to skew though towards the top.

You probably have UV stretching going on, in which case you will want to rethink your seams. To see this, in the window with the UV’s, hit T to bring up the toolbar. Over there somewhere near the bottom is a checkbox that shows “Stretching”. You want everything a dark blue. Light blue is not bad, but pushing green, yellow, red, that’s where you will have problems painting or doing any work in an external image editor.

Maybe you need to pin outside verts and unwrap again to get it symmetrical.How does it look lining up to the texture?

easiest way would be to slect all the verts, except for the last couple of rows toard the pointed bit and choose ‘cylinder’ unwrap. that will unroll it into a rectangular shape, which is what you need for decals. then just unwrap the top bit normally, and put it off in a corner or other region of your texture that is unopccupied. and if it’s a solid color you can scale it waaaay down, and put it almost anywhere there’s a free pixel.

You could also make a new uv layout for the sticker, and project it on to the hat with eth projection modifier. If your wizard hat has a cone shape, try truncating the cone - not having all the top verts meet. That way, you can stretch the verts out a bit, and get a less distorted unwrap. Cones are tough to unwrap.

Thanks for the suggestions all. Such a great help. I ended up using your suggestion Modron since the middle area is where the decal is going to live. Now checking the stretching I am solid blue with angle stretching but with Area it goes dark blue to green from the bottom to the top. Any suggestions on the best way to correct this?

Add an edge loop very near the peak of the hat and add a seam to it. That will cut the tip of the hat off (stretched) and allow the rest of the hat to unwrap as a cylinder.