Texturing cylinder (I know to use gizmo but.....)

[cobalt red 0]

Ok so I spent the night learning and researching the use of gizmo mapping and all that to finally texture cylinders. The only problem is that the top and bottom of the cylinder still warp a bit. I found a topic that had the same problem but it had no real solution. I have spent about an hour now trying to figure it out myself from breaking it into pieces to different sizes and angles.

So what I'm asking is does anyone know how to get the WHOLE cylinder textured properly. (It's a water tower).

And please don't point me at the tut, I'm now going through it for the 10th time.

Thanks!

[max power 21]

So does your cylinder have a flat top or a rounded top, like a pill casing?

For a cylinder with a flat top, to get the least amount of stretching possible, you cut the top and bottom of, leaving a seam around the rim, and unwrap the body of the cylinder with a longitudinal seam. This leaves 3 pieces with 3 seams, if the cylinder has a top and a bottom. If the top and the bottom will then have the same texture map, you can simply (but precisely) overlay the top and bottom so that they both take up the same texture space. This would be the way to do it that is easiest to paint, provided that your unwrap is as orthogonal as possible.

[cobalt red 0]

It is actually rounded on all sides like the pill.

[max power 21]

To use the same sort of layout as above, then, you will have to make a slit from the sides of one of the cut off ends to the centre. This may make it less easy to paint, however.

Otherwise you can unwrap the whole thing as a tube. What I mean is, one seam all the way from pole to pole, with the triangles at the cap cut and only holding on at the base. All longitudinal lines will then be straight and perfectly parallel. This introduces stretching, but in a way that follows the form of the cylinder. The end result should look somewhat like a gridded block with triangle teeth at either end. If you want to make longitudinal metal seems or whatever, you can just paint a vertical line down the whole thing. Horizontal lines work how you would expect them to. With adequate texture definition, you should not really be able to tell that the lines get thinner as they approach the poles unless you are really looking at the thing from directly overhead. This technique works better with more geometry than less.