Staff of Parthalan Progress

I gave up on making UV maps for the branches on the staff. Every time I tried to make some, I ran into scaling issues. On the plus side, I learned how to set seams for Pelt unwrapping.

Utilizing my newly gained skills, I split the branches with abandon and scaled them to around the same size. Then, I split the staff's shaft and flattened it out to run all the way around end to end. This is where I ran into an issue with texture stretching.

Green means no distortion. Red means distortion. Green+red means a little of both.

To fix the stretching, I tried to set the UV vertices in their same relative spacing as their mesh counterparts. This didn't work so well. That's when I found the "Show Edge Distorition" option under the Display menu of the Edit UVWs window. Checking that colors all your edges green or red depending on how much distortion there is (as seen above).

Distortion fixed, I exported the model into Mudbox and fumbled my way around the UI. Once I got the hang of the projection mapping, I used the stock stencils to paint my textures. After that, I exported all the layers into Photoshop for some fine tuning.

All I have left to do now is make the texture for the transition piece that holds the shaft and blade together. Alright, maybe some more tweaking...THEN I'll put it in-game.