UV MAPPING

When first starting the project, i told myself i wanted to try and stretch myself outside of my comfort zone, and doing so i had to try new things. I had never previously UV mapped, nor had Guy, who i was doing it with. Uv mapping is an important part in the overall aesthetics of the project, and if we messed it up, it would show up like a sore thumb on the textures we placed afterwards, so it was quite importatnt that as first timers to it we got it right...
We both were keen to learn to learn this practice, as we thought it would be useful not only in this project, but in other projects too. The first thing we did was go to Alex Hulse, who recommended a few DVDs in the LRC for us to watch, and he took us there and pointed out which were the best to watch. We rented them out and watched them, the Dvd was called UV mapping 101 and it gave very basic details on beginners UV mapping, and how to lay simple planar maps as well as other types of UV map. I followed the tutorials given, and to my surprise it did not take very long for me to pick up how to UV map to give the desired effect i was looking for. However, i made the mostake of trying to learn UV mapping b7y myself previously to this, just messing around in maya trying to figure it out, and i do kind of regret doing so, as it must have wasted a good couple of days of time i could have been practicing UV mapping the proper way. Once i got the hang of UV mapping i started to apply it to some of the objectsi had moddelled. I found that i had a breif gap in between the time i had finished modelling my props, and the time i was waitingt around for other people to finish and give their models to me so that i could put the scene together, so i found myself sitting around quite often with nothing to do, other than the alternative project. However Jared enlightened me as to the fact that i could be sitting there UV mapping all of my props whilst waiting for other members of the group to catch up. I took his advice up, and started working on the UV mapping and it didnt take me very long to map most of my props. I was using simple Planar maps, selecting the faces of my objects that i wanted, and then applying the planar map along the correct axis. Most of my objects required UV mapping on 2 axis, and this wasnt a real problem for me to do, as i enjoyed doing this. Below are a few images of the process i went through to uV map the altar, I used planar mapping to do this to the front view of the altar, then turned the altar round and mapped the side faces of the altar, so that the texture looked as realistic as it could without having too much stretch. I foudn that i got to grips with the UV editor fairly fast too, sometimes it was just a case of rotating the UVs, so that the texture looked in shape, and sometimes it was a case of selecting certain UVs and using the move and scale tools toget desired effects on then texture surface. One of my favourite pieces was the small church window which i UV mapped. I sleected just the glass faces in the UV editor and scaled the UVS to match up with a stained glass texture, whilst the rest of the object matched a granite texture i had placed to give it a rocky texture.