Turbosquid , a commercial online model repository, recently established guidelines that asset contributors should follow so their work meets a common standard of production readiness. They call it CheckMate Certification . Having good UVs is a key feature of it. It's not nice to buy a great looking model, and then open up the UV editor and see a pancake view, where all the polygons are projected from only one angle. This is a big risk for anyone who downloads models, because models can take a lot of time to map and the whole point of the purchase is that you may not have the time for it in your project. For more on the subject, look up http://support.turbosquid.com/entries/20210308.
Now that we've made the spaceship mesh we face a similar and daunting problem. The following is what we face when we add an Unwrap UVW modifier to the model and click on the Open UV Editor button:
By and large the concept of mapping is to neatly pack into the UV mapping square all the object...