UV workflow example

1. Import your object
2. Switch to the UV room
(optional) clear seams and start from scratch if it’s something that’s not been UV’ed before or if it’s something that’s been edited too much to keep the seams.
(alt optional) Auto seams are another good place to start. 3DCoat will try to guess best where the seams should be.
(alt two optional) Sharp Seams are another auto seam best used for mechanical objects as a starting point.
3. You can try both and undo or clear seams at any point.
4. Clicking on the edge creates a seam. Holding Ctrl while clicking removes a seam
5. Make sure to cut/add seams to corner edges to help the shape unfold. If you see an area too red or too blue, it means there will be a lot of unfolded distortion in that area, and you might want to try to cut more seams around it to help the island better unfold.
6. Completely cutting an area off automatically creates a new UV island, and the interface will update with a new color patch for that section.
At this point, the UV previewer is showing what will unwrap when you unwrap it, but currently, it’s not yet unwrapped.
7. Now that we click unwrap, we can see how well the unfolding process worked.
8. (optional) You can rotate and scale the islands a bit to either exaggerate the more important parts (scale them up) and/or reduce the space between islands.
(optional) Use the brush to smudge areas of the island to finish the unfold.
9. We now apply the UV’s the mesh. It’s important to note that we have been editing the UV layout, but we’ve not yet applied them to the mesh. If we export w/o applying or move back to the paint room now, the old UVs will still exist. This is good for trying out different things with your UV set w/o changing anything until you are ready.
10. Move back to the paint room and check your UVs have been updated.