Unwrapping a curved edge for real world purposes

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hey guys, I’m trying to solve a real world problem for a miniatures game I play, where I want to have a shape that I can print onto a decal sheet that fits the front facing of my model’s bases like the model shown.

eg.jpg800×986 105 KB

I’ve taken reference photos of the base and kept the same scale and dimensions but UV unwrapping it is giving me the problem.

bases.jpg756×529 157 KB

Basically how do I unwrap an area so that in the real world it will fit perfectly on that front facing of the base?

Thanks in advance.

2

‘Perfectly’ is geometrically impossible. Just a default unwrapping of the front half on the base instead of the whole thing will do pretty well:

You can improve the fit at the expense of possibly visible joins by putting a few short radial seams along the inner edge:

Or you could do it in two quarters, or …
Basically, the more seams you can live with, the better the fit will be.

Best wishes,
Matthew

3

Unless you are printing onto stretchable material you can’t get this to work, as Matthew has explained in detail above. A simple experiment will demonstrate, try cutting a piece of masking tape to fit in that area without folds. Not going to happen. The way manufacturers do it is to have decal material that is made of cellulose?? that you can slide off a backing sheet. This stretches a bit so you can manipulate it into shape.

In any case I think Blender is the wrong place to design it, Get accurate measurements and do it in Inkscape or Illustrator.

4

Thanks guys,

I might have to resign to using quarters like Matthew said, I might even use your idea DruBan, ie use some masking tape to do the quarter, use a sharp knife to cut it to fit and then take it off an scan it and re-trace it in Illustrator.

Thanks for your help anyhow.