Is this being done for completeness sake? I have converted mine to mesh but the parts are sooo small and all separate objects I can't see it's worth unwrapping them when I can just apply a plastic or metal material to them directly. Plus I have a lot more cables and just can't see the point.
Good news thehomme ,
Curves already have a UV Map and when you Convert your Curve to Mesh, that Map is conserved, so you don't need to Unwrap the cables, you can use the existing UV Map:
I don't mind the unwrapping but I'm a details man. It's just trying to understand what's being done as essential and what's just being done as 'best practice'
eg. if the goal of unwrapping is to balance making seams/islands then what's the point of creating another island to unwrap the joint of the finger that can't be seen even in massive close up?
So often JL stresses about getting a perfect unwrap for the base on the pot which you can't / won't see. He even says 'you won't see this' but then spends ages doing the unwrap. When you don't know anything it makes you less certain of if it'll come back to be a problem. With the topology I knew enough to be able to be able to diverge from the lesson and be confident.
No you don't have to unwrap every single detail, it's up to you. Most of the time if you're working in a hurry and on your own, you make a mess and leave it as is. If you're working on a production there will probably be guidelines to follow and if you're making an educational tutorial you'll probably want to be organized and tidy things up the best.
Another question (sorry)
This is a bolt I modelled. Why have the UV's separated into separate islands when I've not marked those as seams. I can happily ignore this but I just want to understand what the problem is. I'm assuming it's some sort of legacy from the way I modelled this piece (which I can't remember now)
Yeah normals are fine. I think I might have started with a plane and not a cylinder as I got used to modelling with polypen in C4D. So I created the shape and then did a loop tools circle and extruded back.
Yeah this is what I did as I can see there's no thickness to the model. So I reckon it's the loop tool circle that's the cause the islands appear around that circle edge as if I'd marked a seam
To answer the original question, we unwrap the cables so that we can bake the texture later on. You don't have to do that step and can skip the cables if you just want to keep Pothead in Blender, but it's needed in order to export him to a game engine, online viewer, or any other app.
For the Q about the finger, that's a good example of where you can cut corners if you want! Hopefully 'ages' is an exaggeration😅 If it won't be seen it doesn't really matter. There have certainly been times where I thought something wouldn't be seen but it ends up being shown anyway, so I would be careful about that, but overall it's just for best practice's sake and not required.
In the bolt screenshot, it looks like the cylinder is extruded straight back from a filled in circle? The selected vertices are showing up as connected to 3 islands, which indicates to me that it's a non-manifold mesh that would not have a valid unwrap, which would explain why it's keeping the old UVs and it doesn't get updated when you unwrap again.