Help me become a better artist

I am creating this thread to improve on my texture/low poly work. Don't bother with telling me to post in my gallery thread or quick crit thread. This is a studio section and we should start using it as one. We need to start creating more threads with more specific art in this section. Get things going.

Alright to the point:
I am new to the world of texturing. I have the main idea of what I should be doing, but I need to be put on track with what I am doing wrong.

I am going to start from scratch on this one (Concerning low poly and texture), so that I can improve my first piece.
This is what I have and will be deleted:
UV:
http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/n...ter/unwrap.png

I am no expert, but when I was texturing this, I felt like I had way to many parts in the UV. So in the middle of the night, I thought of something; I could mirror a lot of this stuff, and save more then 75 percent of the space that is being wasted atm.

This is my texture atm (Metal wasn't done):
http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/n...ighter/8-1.jpg
http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/n...flighter/9.jpg
http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/n...lighter/10.jpg


So today or tomorrow, I will have some new shots of my new low poly. Hopefully I can distribute my polies better then this one. :)
Btw, thanks to Neuro for getting me thinking.

I thought you couldnt mirror/overlap uvw's when you bake high to low poly.
Are we thinking about just reuvw'ing the low poly after bake and overlapping shells at that stage?

This is an example of what I was thinking:
For the leg, I would only create one low poly, then I would unwrap only that leg and make normal's for it. From there, I would texture it and after all that is done, I would mirror that leg into the 4 positions. Once that is done, I would simple make it one object by just attaching all the legs together, therefore it would use the same UV space, and not need a separate UV section for each leg.

EDIT: Whoops, saw that it wasn't done. Glad you know the metal needs serious attention though.

You may also want to make the setions with the light blue a lot more powerful; I'm not really caring that they're there right now.

Yea, I didn't even really touch the main middle part. Glad I didn't.

first of all, your UV's are bad.

BUT, that's 90% to blame on you having a bad lowpoly to begin with.

making a properly built lowpoly is 75% of your actual UVing-work.

half the stuff im going to list here you already know, but i'm going to list it anyway.

-you have every leg unique
that's un-fucking-forgivable really. take a quick look at your UV-map with ONLY one leg (detach the other 3) and do the same woth the other 'panels' on the inner bit. then ALSO do the same with half of the 'main' body.

just take a quick look at how much space you literally wasted.

-your lowpoly is plain bad (by my standards at least)

first of all, THIS:

http://i623.photobucket.com/albums/t...niggertits.jpg

next:
you've got a heap of VERY thin edgeloops going around everhwere which have no business being there, because they should only be in the normalmap.
if you really wanted to have them there (prevent 'flat' looking stuff), build them so you can have it all in the same smoothinggroup+uv cluster (generally a V shape instead of a U shape)

invest your polygons in the SILHOUETTE
even more so with this being a very round object everywhere.
especially with round edges like this, you NEED to have those edged defined well or you're going to get stupid baking mess-ups

talk to me on aim, and i can point out exactly how and why and where your lowpoly is bad.

-your bake is pretty bad
but that's mostly due to your lowpoly being bad.
in general, if your lowpoly looks good (smoothed) you won't get any smoothing bleeding trough your normalmap either.

the 'waviness' you get on the top of your central cylinder is 100% because of a badly set-up cage.
for straight up cylinders like that, you should always have the 'cap' of the cylinder be projected from AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE, so that the sides are projected (as close to as possible) perpendicularly.

there's a trick of cutting in extra 'buffer' edges in your lowpoly bake-mesh which can massively improve the baking of these edges.
this trick ONLY works if it doesn't affect the smoothing of an object (so smooth/uv clever/properly!!!)
i could go into detail about this, but it's really an advanced technique i wouldnt bother with yet if i were you.

-bad UVs
what you should always keep in mind, is pixels are SQUARE.
you'll generally always want to UV your objects to have every single UV-seam as square as possible, but also as little deformation as possible.

it's usually completely possibly to get away with both (not so much on this particular object)
like this, every cylinder should always be UVd into a perfect rectangle (except the cap duh)
and every single UV-piece you have on your UV-sheet that's slightly curved can be made to be perfectly straight with no UV deformations whatsoever.

that'll not only lead to MUCH cleaner UV-sheets, but much better display of your normalmap on seam-areas as well. (i suppose i can make an example of this later)

--------------------
this is all i can think of for now, i can ask dane to crit your texturing if you opst your texturemaps.

all i can say for now is get an ambient bake, and learn to make some 'dirty' on it.
(those grills on the legs for example would be a perfect place for some dirty)
and i'd shove some more contract into your spec (almost looks like there is no spec map on there at all)

This my friends, is critique.

Wouldn't hurt for him to let you know what you're doing right, too, just so you don't waste time worrying about things he didn't mention.

<the rest>

Haha, yea pretty much.
Now its on to knowing what I did horribly wrong with my texture.
(I feel bad for posting this, as I have already been told how shitty it is)
http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/n...ompleteMap.jpg
Here is a link to it:
http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/n...ompleteMap.jpg

There's no need to unwrap every repetitive part and give it unique UV space. Unless there's something significant on each of those legs that each one would require unique UV's then you should simply unwrap one and duplicate the already unwrapped piece.

Yea, that's what I was going at. Going to try and having something tomorrow to show or the next.