Hello everyone, guess everyone knows how complicated UV can be at time and I was wondering if I should model my water hose(that will be somewhat the main actor of my scene) as a straight line then Work UVs, deform to path and/or bend modifier without deforming my UVs. It will be easier to UV straight geometry then bended stuff all around but I am not sure if this will affect my UVs in some funky way.

I am asking because I often loose my UVs when i go down my modifier stack and move stuffs around.

thx for any advice.

You should be able to simply use cylindrical mapping on the straight hose. The coords should stick for deforming mods above the mapping.
So, mapping first, then deforming modifiers on top.

Unless you have tons of crazy bends, try modelling first and then unwrapping like this:

Apply uvw unwrap, select all poly’s except end caps (if there are any) open edit and select “Box No Top Mapping” or “Flatten Mapping”.
Stitch a few edges and relax by face angles: amount to 1, iterations to around 1000, click a few times till the uv’s stop bending.

You could straighten out all the lines but textures will stretch, depends how much screen space this will be taking up/how detailled the textures are.

//Personally I rarely ever use cylinder maps as they just fill the uv tile regardless of the shape and therefore require alteration before textures can be applied.//

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