Fuel Tank UV Mapping in Cinema 4D

In this video, I walk you through my workflow for UV mapping a fuel tank. It’s a process that’s pretty straightforward, however there are many variations in the technique.

I didn’t just decide to create a UV mapping tutorial about a fuel tank; it was created in response to a question by my friend Mirko who asked about the way I attack this specific challenge. In the video below we look at a few approaches to mapping the tank. First we look at the concept of breaking the tank’s UVs into multiple shells to minimize distortion. We then take a look at what happens if you try to keep the tank as a contiguous mesh. Finally we look at splitting the tank along predefined edges to find a happy medium between the two approaches.

A note about “unwrap” and “relax”:

When recording the video above, I found myself using the words “unwrap” and “relax” interchangeably. This is simply me mixing up the terms and usually when working in the Relax UV panel and I say “unwrap”, I really mean “relax”.

The fuel tank used is actually the tank created for my Generic Sport Bike model on TurboSquid.

Here are a few stills from the screencast