UVW unwrapping started + Preparation techniques

Just a quick update, I have prepared the models for unwrapping, as a solution to the many pieces I have to unwrap that are similar I have developed a simple solution. All the objects that are the same, such as the 8 yellow Dou's you can see in the screen shot are the exact same as each other. My plan is to now delete all of those that are copied and create a 'Master' clone. From this I will then copy the master clone creating instances and replacing the deleted clones with the replacement instances. This will then mean that I would only have to unwrap the single 'Master' Dou and it shall unwrap all of the copied instances. Although the textures will come out the same, the materials of what they are made of (red stained wood) will be the same and that's what I'm going for.



From the image above, you can clearly see the 'master' Dou for this model, unwrapping this piece would unwrap all of the yellow ones. So this method should hopefully save me some extra time whilst unwrapping. I've never done this method or thought of doing this method previously to this but I'm hoping it can shave some production time off of my creation process.

To show clearly what I'm talking about I have a quick demonstration below, I'm going to refer to this as the 'master and slave' technique. Here you can see the whole main model with the master and slave technique. The master pieces are in black and the slave pieces are in bright green.



From this you can see how much less unwrapping I have to do, this will also be the same fore texturing also. Let's have a closer look at a whole set of brackets.

Black pieces = Master | Green Pieces = Slave

This side shows a lot of master pieces in use, however I tried to keep the master pieces to all one side of the model so I can keep them all grouped to ease the unwrap process. Here below you can now also see the other side of the model, this can really show the amount of reduction to the unwrapping stage this could potentially do, green being the parts I wont have to unwrap again, only once with the master piece.



For a quick demonstration on a single master piece of how it will work. Here is a small 'Dou' with it's master being affected in some way, as you can see it affects all instances within the scene.



Honestly I wish I though of this much, much sooner into the production process as it would of saved a lot of time, but oh well. We learn and must soldier on...