what should the final unwrapped mesh look like?
I am not sure what the proper way to unwrap the top “cap” is.
Also I was trying to unwrap a simple cylinder using UVmapping to obtain a similiar result to the standard texture mapping technique.
What buttons/orientation, etc, do I need to make this happen?
I always seem to get the circle top and bottom parts of the cylinder all lying on top of one another at the top of the image I wish to map.
Finally, when should I weld stuff together and when should I leave it seperated? If I have islands of one side of a hand in one place and another island with the other side of the hand in another place in the image, how can I paint a line/wrinkle across the 2 sections and have them line up in the final result?
I haven’t tried unwrapping it completely myself. But I know the mesh has got a really ugly shape UV mapping-wise. The really sharp thing at the top could be done with cylindrical unwrapping. The other part maybe with two From Window’s, then stitched together in the UV editor. Where you want to stitch depends, probably in the most visible part, so you don’t see the seam.
The tutorial explains how to unwrap a simple cylinder (not filled at the top and bottom).
Note that it is not always possible to get it like the Material buttons. For example, take the Sphere button in the material buttons, applied to a filled cylinder. If you look at the rendered output, at the top and bottom, you’ll see how the scale of the texture varies within one face, which is impossible with UV mapping. The difference is that with Material buttons mapping, the position is calculated per pixel, instead of being defined by UVs.
Try using spherical mapping.
If you have a hand, I can’t think of much welding you can do. We definitly need the possibility to blend the textures at the seams somehow. I can’t give you any advice on this, as I’ve never painted a texture, maybe someone more experienced in this might be able to give you some tips.
A good way to get even seams is to use the texture paint tool to establish the correct values, save the painted image, and go into a paint program to do the touch up.