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TESLA remodeled (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2009 10:26 pm
by Fendorin
Hello i wanted begun a thread for propose a new model for TESLA
Like asking in the dev-List, it would be like the current one (for general shape/arrangement)

I discover a nice tips could be realy andolian' style. It's look likefrom 2D--to 3D rendering
i draw the part of the ship with Inkscape (vector software like illustrator/GIMP) especially the plating of the ship.
he don't look like final (it look like very flat )

For show you the technique do you remenber this kind of construction in layer wood ?? here a picture: http://www.quatuor.be/decoration/vlaemsch_moose.jpg

Then untill you have finish your vectorized draw Save your SVG file and import it into Blender DivShare File - tesla.svg (here the draw i use for did the base of the below Ship)and give it a volume/ moove arrange the part of your SVG file.

I think the Andolian' style should be like that, is a clear representation of how a 2D "world" become in 3D and for reflect the spirit of Andolian is not a bad idea and do a difference between other human and human meaning/brain.

in general a different technique/approach should be create for design each principal faction ship it will be more consistant

here the pics about early stage of Tesla redraw:
Side ORTHO view
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3/4 up
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3/4 down
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the rear thruster
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view over a 6 spinals gun:
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New texture for Andolian :
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rear of new designed andolian M turret
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The turret Point defence line side and the telemetric tower at early stage.
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No detail for the moment and the model before clean up are around 15K mesh the Target for polycount could be around 50K+5 UVmap to 1024pot

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2009 10:35 pm
by loki1950
I like the tessellation makes it look like it could change it's shape 8)

Enjoy the Choice :)

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2009 11:10 pm
by MC707
Looking awesome! I can't spot the bridge, though.

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2009 5:43 pm
by charlieg
Fanstastic as always Fendorin. :D

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2009 11:29 pm
by Fendorin
hi i worked over the turret too
i propse a new classification for turret: first each important faction should 3 size of turret S(small maybe 7m lenght) M(mediulm 14 lenght) L (large 28m lenght or 21m??) what about this idea??
i thought Andolian's product could have a 45 degres angle an 90 and less curve they can?
Image

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2009 7:42 am
by Turbo
Very creative as always. And I think this design fits the Andolian faction very well.

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2009 6:09 pm
by Deus Siddis
Fendorin wrote:hi i worked over the turret too
i propse a new classification for turret: first each important faction should 3 size of turret S(small maybe 7m lenght) M(mediulm 14 lenght) L (large 28m lenght or 21m??) what about this idea??
i thought Andolian's product could have a 45 degres angle an 90 and less curve they can?
Image
Yeah, I second this call for standardization of weapon sizes. I think we should base it on the individual weapons though first, and then build the turrets around the weapons they carry. Currently the game has something like Light, Medium, Heavy, Light Capship, Medium Capship, Heavy Capship. If we knew the general Length and Diameter of each of these weapon sizes then building them into ships and turrets would be easy and really add to the visual consistency of the game. It would be good to get jackS' word on this.

Getting back to the thread topic now, this model is really excellent! This kind of complexity can really help VS visually compete with the closed source/content space games like Infinity and Mass Effect. It doesn't totally look like the Tesla though to me, it seems more like another one of the large Andolian Capitals. Maybe there current in-game model isn't canon though. . .

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2009 10:48 pm
by Fendorin
Thanks for your reply it's giving me motivation to continue

But Still we miss JackS words a lot it's the one can poke/push the entire Artwork part

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2009 4:06 pm
by chuck_starchaser
Wow! This looks really well armored. It's good when thing look like what they are; one thing is reading in the stats of a ship that it has X amount of armor; quite another is to see that it does. Good stuff!

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Fri Mar 06, 2009 7:00 pm
by Fendorin
hi !
i worked over a greebling for the main hull section:
it's should be a long moment for unwrap -but because i like be efficient- (and dislike unwrapp) i mark seams at the same time i m model the mesh
then one long and boring unwrap part would be already did when i will unwrap the mesh .

Another point for the dark part i thought maybe i will unwrap it like a face projection
but i don't know if it's could be good and linkable with the future Cinemut shader?
"need advise"
Image

Thanks

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 9:21 am
by chuck_starchaser
Fendorin wrote:hi !
i worked over a greebling for the main hull section:
Looks good!
it's should be a long moment for unwrap -but because i like be efficient- (and dislike unwrapp) i mark seams at the same time i m model the mesh
then one long and boring unwrap part would be already did when i will unwrap the mesh .
I mark seams as I go along, for the same reason.
Another point for the dark part i thought maybe i will unwrap it like a face projection
but i don't know if it's could be good and linkable with the future Cinemut shader?
"need advise"
Are you talking about projecting say a square panel WITH little pipes and boxes projected as a single UV island?
That's never going to work.
Okay, suppose you have a flat plane and a cone sitting on it, like

Code: Select all

        /\
    ----------
If you unwrap them together, the area of the plane under the cone ends up sharing the same spot in the texture as the cone itself. The problem with that is that when you bake an AO, if the plane is baked first, it has a black spot under the cone (the shadow), but later, when the cone is baked, it overwrites the shadow with its own AO brightness, and that's okay. BUT, if the cone is processed first, and the plane later, the shadow of the plane will overwrite the cone's brightness, and it will look like a dark cone. So, each time you do that, you take a 50-50 chance it will come out wrong.
The problem is worse when it comes to PRT's and radiosity bakings.
You simply cannot cheat about the cardinal rule of not sharing texture areas. It's harder work, but it has to be done.
The incompatibility of texture sharing is not with CineMut, nor even with shaders, in general. The incompatibility is with light baking tools.

Note:
Smarter baking tools should be able to work with texture sharing and figure out which part of the geometry should get texture priority, but I haven't seen such smart tools anywhere. A simple first, per-vertex AO pass could serve as the deciding factor for priority; but nobody out there is thinking. Hopefully some day...

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 9:47 am
by Fendorin
Then the "solution" should be a well unwrapping with all texel separetly ( except if it black) :cry: (i couldn't earn time.....)

but about a small greebling if the "shape" of the greebling is more tiny than a few texel the AO and other baking should be realy "pixelized"?

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 6:02 pm
by chuck_starchaser
Not sure I understand your question; but maybe I do.
You want to keep the scaling of your UV islands constant. That is, if an item A in the ship's mesh is of a similar shape but half the size of another item B, then the UV unwrap of A should be half the size of the UV unwrap of B in the texture space. No exceptions.
I've seen some people out there recommending to unwrap parts of a model to a bigger island, if the modeler wants to show more texture detail in that specific spot.
In my experience, that is BAD advice. Seeing even one small part of a ship showing sharper texturing just about ruins the rest of the ship, as then you notice the pixelation of the rest of the ship by contrast to the sharper section.
There are technical reasons as well: The GPU optimizes the mip-map level globally for a mesh; but if the scaling of the UV-map is not even, then parts of the texture will look blurry, and other parts will look point-sampled.

So, I guess your question is, what do you do when some parts of the geometry are so small that, to keep the same scaling as the rest of the ship, must be unwrapped to less than a texel's width?
That's a very good question, and one for which I don't have an easy answer. But I do have some "tricks" ...

Filthy trick 1: Increase the size of the texture
Usually, you'll only have such small greebles in capital ships or space stations. Larger ships and stations should have large textures, anyways.

Filthy trick 2: Make some of the tiny greebles black
Bolt heads and nuts can be black, as they can be made of a pretty dark metal, almost black, anyways.
Wires can be black, as they usually have rubber insulation, anyways, which is pretty dark.

Filthy trick 3: Make the rest of the tiny greebles metallic
By "metallic" I mean some grayish tone in specular; black in diffuse.
Note that Ambient Occlusion and radiosity bakes apply to the diffuse component of a material, so if a material is black in diffuse,
then it doesn't matter whether its AO bake is pixelated, as the AO will have no effect on it.

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 12:17 am
by Fendorin
thanks for the Trick !!!
and yes you understand my question really cleary you begin to understand between my bad word....grammar :lol:
thanks for the clear answers

And Yes if the Grey parts are Inox/silverish effect it could be really nice AND usefull

--Another question--
Could it be possible or compatible with the future improvement (Ogre, cinemute) this propostiton:
Exemple:
-i create a andolian station around 200 000 triangle
-one texture map for the all plating (i.e the armor like upper, simple geometric=simple mesh but numerous)
-another texture map for the main body (i/e with light reactor radiator textured or "patterned")
-another texture map just for handle the additional detail like docking bridge or some special point but more detailled, the purpose a docking space/bridge"

Imagine simply :the current asteroid station 2048 map for all the model
but in addition the docking part (inside) handle by a separate 2048 map too,
then maybe 1pixel on the first map should be handle by 5X5 on another but because inside the docking area more details are needed?
(am i clear??)

could it be a solution too??

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 3:44 pm
by chuck_starchaser
Whenever there is a change of textures, it takes a huge amount of time for the videocard
to switch; so, the short answer is that, while it is possible to have multiple meshes
and give each mesh its own UV unwrap, it may be better for performance to have fewer
texture sets.
Having said that, having two or three texture sets for a space station is not bad. What IS
bad is if you have 20 texture sets in one ship or station.
Having said the having said, there was a game by ID, maybe it was Doom2, where the
entire game used a single, huge texture of like 128k by 128k texels, all models sharing it,
to avoid the costs of texture set switching; and the ID guys are geniuses, so maybe the
issue is more serious than most people think, even myself :D
Having said the having said the... Having multiple meshes in a model is not expensive
if they share a common texture set; and if you texture four meshes separately, you can
later put all 4 textures into a big texture in Gimp, and fix the UV unwraps by moving and
scaling, so that they match their new quadrants.
But (having said the)^4, modeling and texturing are so much work already, I cheat and
forget about it. When I redid the refinery station texturing for PU, for example, I kept
the existing 10 or so texture sets, and to hell with it. There's only so much work I'm
willing to do.
P.S.: Don't forget to limit individual meshes to about 10,000 triangles, as GPU's can
only address 64k vertex indexes; some maybe 32k indexes. Each quad counts as two
triangles. In worst case (flat shading), there's 3 vertex indexes per triangle, so 3 x
10,000 = 30,000; and so you risk hitting "paging mode" (very slow) if you go far above
that. Mentioning because you mention 200,000 polygons. You can have multiple meshes
of 10,000 triangles each, no problem. In fact, you should keep them as a single object
through the unwrapping, so you only create one texture set. But then split the big
object into smaller objects, < 10k triangles each, before exporting.

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2009 2:41 pm
by Phlogios
I believe that Id game was Rage, but I'm not sure.

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2009 3:27 pm
by Phlogios
Confirmed. It was Rage, and they have multiple gigantic textures. One human face texture was 2000x2000 (not power of two?).
The 128kx128k texture was a landscape texture, 80 GB uncompressed.

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2009 7:03 pm
by chuck_starchaser
Hmmm... What someone told me was about a game that had a single texture for the whole game; but
maybe his info was wrong. That all sounds very odd... Actually, a huge terrain texture suddenly makes
sense, in the sense that you'd probably want to keep it from occupying space in the videocard. Making
it so big would probably result in its being allocated in system memory and always be read through the
PCIE/whatever bus, which is slower, but would prevent driving the local memory allocator insane.

EDIT:
I wonder if vegastrike wouldn't benefit from putting all space backgrounds and planet textures into one
humongous texture, which therefore gets allocated to system memory and frees videocard memory for
only ships and stations...

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2009 7:32 am
by Phlogios
Be sure to watch it in HD:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnBPqrhY3hw

John Carmack talking about their new engine, mentioning the 128kx128k texture.

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2009 6:16 pm
by chuck_starchaser
He doesn't mention the real time advantages and how they work; but I think I get the idea.
Thanks for the link! Yeah, I'm becoming convinced we'd have much to gain from doing
something like that, like put all planet textures into one megatexture. Hell, maybe for
CineMut, I could change the standard such that all the textures are read from a single
texture. Oooohooo! This is a winner, I think. Gotta run that by klauss.

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2009 5:46 am
by Neskiairti
I am seeing paralells within parallels :P

by the way... LOVE the ship, it is quite beautiful. Perhaps not an elegant ship, but functional and it looks to be what it is.

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2009 9:34 pm
by Fendorin
Hello alls
i finally get back with this topic for some advanced Wip pics
the current ship is around 24000 tris means i still can add details (i pass month to clean the mesh and learn how to do it into blender)
this model below have no face overlapped
But at this stage unwrapping is not too workable; then i have a question for some specialist
How use ingame atlas texture? ( this one cancel baking anything with blender i guess)
Could we attribute differente texture to the same mesh or the mesh need to be separate in differente object ?

like previousky explain i would like to unwrap the docking bay but not the all ship is it workable


Image
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Image
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Image

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 11:25 pm
by chuck_starchaser
Hello, Fendorin; I was just taking a stroll to see what was happening around here; nice to see such great work.
Fendorin wrote:the current ship is around 24000 tris means i still can add details
Certainly.
this model below have no face overlapped
Excellent!
But at this stage unwrapping is not too workable
Why not? If you mean because the mesh is not finished, yet, I agree: The mesh should be totally, totally finished before you start unwrapping.
How use ingame atlas texture? ( this one cancel baking anything with blender i guess)
I don't understand your question. If you're talking about CineMut, and its use of atlases, forget that for now; CM is far from ready. I stopped work on it for a few months, and I've just now started to re-read my previous work, to try and remember what I was doing.
Could we attribute differente texture to the same mesh or the mesh need to be separate in differente object ?
In Blender you CAN attribute more than one texture to a single mesh or object (using materials); but you just don't want to do that.
For a large space station, maybe yes; but then you'd use sub-units, then each sub-unit has its own bfxm. If you're really adamant about having more than one texture, that's less than ideal performance-wise, and it will complicate your bakes; but be my guest... IF you decide to go that way, I'd recommend you separate your ship into two objects, and use one texture space for each.
But if at all possible, try to get the whole mesh unwrapped in a single texture (UV space). If you need more space, just make the texture bigger.
like previousky explain i would like to unwrap the docking bay but not the all ship is it workable
Not sure what you mean by it not being "workable". Unwrapping is part-science/part-art. Some unwraps are more difficult than others, but all are workable, given time and effort.
If you can post the .blend file with the area of interest selected, maybe I can give you a hand.

I also recently discovered how to unwrap a ship and do 1/2 as much work: If your ship is symmetric, and you're using the Mirror attribute, you can unwrap half the ship on half the texture (before applying the mirror attribute); then apply the mirror attribute, and finally select the other (new) half of the ship, and mirror-flip it in the UV map.
This not only saves you half the unwrapping work, but it also saves you a lot of texturing work, as the two sides are precisely identical in the UV map, so for symmetric texture features, you can copy the texture on one side, flip it, and paste it on the other.

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 7:39 pm
by Fendorin
But at this stage unwrapping is not too workable
Why not? If you mean because the mesh is not finished, yet, I agree: The mesh should be totally, totally finished before you start unwrapping.
Because
1 take me too much time,
2 island is too tiny compare by what i want it will be
Basicly i want a nice visual detail texture
How use ingame atlas texture? ( this one cancel baking anything with blender i guess)
I don't understand your question. If you're talking about CineMut, and its use of atlases, forget that for now; CM is far from ready. I stopped work on it for a few months, and I've just now started to re-read my previous work, to try and remember what I was doing.
I mean ortho texture tiled texture projected texture ... i m not a specialist something like old time ...
not unwrapped if it's possible , some current model (the old capital aera ship into VS for example,the Ox too) have this kind of texture , but if we increase the quality of this texture and add a normal map,spec and luma i guess we can have a nice result no?
or all massive ship have to be unwrap as fighter ( i don't think is a good idea.. due to the different size pixel aspect ratio.)


here a file for taking a look : DivShare File - Andolian_Detailled_Project.blend
like previousky explain i would like to unwrap the docking bay but not the all ship is it workable

Not sure what you mean by it not being "workable". Unwrapping is part-science/part-art. Some unwraps are more difficult than others, but all are workable, given time and effort.
If you can post the .blend file with the area of interest selected, maybe I can give you a hand.
I mean:
The hangar bay is a independant mesh unwrapped on 2K texture , i can bake AO and Radio ...etc something really nice
INTO another mesh (the star ship hull) which is projected,ortho,...Generic tilled textured... something ..nice as i want give a huge aspect effect)
Do you get the idea?

Re: TESLAremodeling Proposition (Andolian anticapship cruiser)

Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 1:23 am
by chuck_starchaser
Fendorin wrote:Because
1 take me too much time,
I agree that unwrapping takes a lot of time. "Too much" is debatable, of course. You get faster in time; but yeah, it takes me about equal time to unwrap a ship as it takes me to model it.
2 island is too tiny compare by what i want it will be
Basicly i want a nice visual detail texture
"Tiny" is a relative term; --relative to the size of the texture.
I mean ortho texture tiled texture projected texture ... i m not a specialist something like old time ...
not unwrapped if it's possible , some current model (the old capital aera ship into VS for example,the Ox too) have this kind of texture , but if we increase the quality of this texture and add a normal map,spec and luma i guess we can have a nice result no?
or all massive ship have to be unwrap as fighter ( i don't think is a good idea.. due to the different size pixel aspect ratio.)
No, no, nooo, Fendorin. Don't take BAD examples from the past to justify doing the wrong thing. It is true that many of the old models in Vegastrike have multiple textures and various mappings; but those are game-modeling HORRORS, in terms of performance. It was decided long time ago (before my time), not just in Vegastrike but across the gaming industry, to avoid multiple textures. The rule is, with VERY few exceptions allowable: ONE texture per ship; UV-mapped. Period. No if's or but's. In fact, Hellcat once asked me if I could write a program to convert old meshes so as to unify all textures into a single texture --which assignment I chickened from--; but just to let you know this rule is VERY important. It takes a lot of work, I agree, but it has to be done. What you're proposing is going backwards; you don't want to go that way, at all.
So, forget projection; forget orco... UV-unwrap; whole ship; one texture.
here a file for taking a look : DivShare File - Andolian_Detailled_Project.blend
like previousky explain i would like to unwrap the docking bay but not the all ship is it workable
The whole ship MUST be unwrapped onto a single texture, Fendorin. The only current exception is for transparent parts, such as cockpit glass, for fighters, which uses a different shader. The other exception would be for very large space stations, under very special circumstances (it is better to use sub-units, if the reason is multiple instances).
Now, I'm looking at your .blend file, and was about to unwrap parts of it for you, but I'm having mysterious problems...
Seems you're using some Blender features I know nothing about... I don't understand what's going on... In Object mode,
I right-click on an engine, for instance, hit Tab to go to Edit mode, to see the mesh, no problem; but as soon as I hit Tab
again to go back to Object mode, the engine disappears. Right now many parts of the ship have disappeared or become
invisible, and I don't understand why :-/
UPDATE:
I sort-of figured out the problem; not completely... You seem to be in a habit of moving, scaling, rotating objects in Object
mode. Try to avoid that. Blender is either very buggy or very cryptic about its treatement of transformations in Object mode.
I avoid them like the plague. I only move, scale and rotate meshes in Edit mode, and leave my objects alone, all with
their centers at the origin.
When you scale and rotate objects, you have to eventually hit Ctrl-A and click on Apply Scaling and Rotation.
Otherwise your normals get messed up, and all kinds of weirdness happens.
Also, you have ***gazillions*** of objects... at least 50 of them... The way I work is while I'm editing small parts of a mesh
I do it as a separate object; but once I'm done editing it I join it (Ctrl-J) to a mesh. I have at most 5 or 6 object at any time,
for the whole model.
So, to try to Ctrl-A your objects, I called up an Outliner screen. Most of them got Applied okay, but the engines grew
larger and moved away from the ship, when I applied them; I don't understand why. Also, one part of the main mesh
rotated itself...

Image

I don't know why this is happening; it never happened to me; it's got to be you're using Blender features I know
nothing about.
Another thing I do is I name my meshes. You have not only a large number of meshes, but they are all named
cryptically, like "mesh49.002", so, looking for things on the outliner doesn't help.
Not sure what you mean by it not being "workable". Unwrapping is part-science/part-art. Some unwraps are more difficult than others, but all are workable, given time and effort.
If you can post the .blend file with the area of interest selected, maybe I can give you a hand.
I mean:
The hangar bay is a independant mesh unwrapped on 2K texture
Been looking for it; I can't find any mesh with a UV-mapping; but maybe I've missed it, there being so many objects.
, i can bake AO and Radio ...etc something really nice
INTO another mesh (the star ship hull) which is projected,ortho,...Generic tilled textured... something ..nice as i want give a huge aspect effect)
Do you get the idea?
I think I do; but it is a BAD idea.
If you use tiled textures, you lock yourself out of the possibility of ambient occlusion.

You need to learn how to UV-unwrap, and get used to it. The engines, for example, should be unwrapped first,
then copied around.
In fact. You could start with a single engine, in another layer, centered on the origin, cut it so that you only have
one quarter of it left, and put mirror on X and Y (or X and Z), so it becomes a full engine again. Then you unwrap
that one quarter; then you apply mirror for one of the axes, select the new parts of the mesh, flip and move the
islands. Repeat for the other axis.
Now your whole engine is unwrapped.
Now you move the mesh to layer one, copy it, move the copy to a location where you want an engine, and in the
UV map you move its unwrap, say, to the bottom-left corner.
You copy the engine again, move it onto another engine location, then move its uv-unwrap near the previous
unwrap, above or to the right of the uv-unwrap of the first engine.
Wash and repeat until all the engines are placed, for half the ship.
Keep unwrapping all the parts of half the ship onto only half of the UV texture space.
When you're done unwrapping that half of the ship, you join all your objects together, apply mirror, select the
new half of the ship (in Edit mode), then in the UV window select its unwrap (which by default will be
overlapping the first half), flip it horizontally, and move it to the opposite side of the texture. And it's done.

So you only manually unwrap one quarter of one engine, and the rest is just copying and flipping and copying.

Take a look here for a very good way to organize a UV unwrap:
http://wcjunction.com/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... 0000#20000

Another thing you could do to make your unwrapping easier is to try and avoid triangles.
Take a look at this Gladius mesh:

Image

In the entire mesh I only have two triangles, if I remember correctly. Couldn't find a way to get rid of them.
A mesh made entirely of quads is easier to work with, easier to unwrap, subsurf-friendly, and often it
shades better.
Looking at your ship, the mesh is completely triangulated; in fact, I don't see a single quad...

Image

And some of the triangles are very long and thin. That's VERY hard to work with.
Easier to show than to explain: I did a start of a mesh base for one of these sections. Just
extruded a polygon, then Ctrl-R loop cuts everywhere I figured a cut is needed.

Image

All the lines are either straight front-to-back, or transversal. Don't really have to be straight,
but more or less... Then you can split the quads that need diagonals, and once the areas
to be raised have their perimeters drawn, select them, Ctrl-E, ESC, and Alt-S and raise
them. It will make not just unwrapping, but everything easier to have a mesh made
of quads only, and a grid-like subdivision.