Hi Randy,
The idea of Carbon fiber, so far I understand it, that the fiber by itself can be bend, but has no option to change its length. Interwoven it becomes by itself a little bit like fabric, as the fibers itself are not connected. But the no change of length stays the same. So it needs some massaging of the fabric to shape it so it can go into the mold and as Wiki puts it: “The binding polymer is often a thermoset resin such as epoxy, but other thermoset or thermoplastic polymers, such as polyester, vinyl ester or nylon, are sometimes used.” This combination allows for the strength.
To create a relatively nice representation of it, yes, UV editing is certainly the way to go here. My suggestion would be, to create a black and white texture that “reads” like a checker board texture, but has one direction clearly readable. The checkerboards should be similar to the Final texture, or a clear known multiplication of such, so you get not lost. The UV texture in your example is to even colored and too large speaking of the squares.
Set your current UV texture to Tile in UV, to get an idea how dense this needs to be. This texture will help to guid the manual process to get this established. I’m not aware of a good automatic that could do it for you.
I guess you know all of that, but I needed this so we talk about the same.
I guess the lower part of your model (image orientation) will give the start point. From there you might just take a plain texture to sketch with BodyPaint 3D the “flow” of the fabric. Memorizing the work with Glas-fiber/Polyester, the main areas need to be determine and possible seams must be defined. What part will be visible when the part is build in, etc. These thoughts must be in the sketch. Then take some rendering from it, and replace it with the checkerboard texture (not the shader)
Form there is is mostly selecting certain points and move them. The UV Manager>Line Up UV (points_ might be a good step between to get some orientation back into the current mesh.
Interactive projecting might help for some areas, but it might also require a lot of time to fix the “island” results then to a homogeneous texture.
Start with one of the larger areas—if that is the one most prominently visible later on.
UV is interactive work, hard to tell for such an “complex task” what to do. I check some initially projection, but I’m not happy with the results, so no suggestions here. What I would avoid is, to texture with the SubDivision Object Surface constantly on. Checking from time to time, of course.
I have attached an screen shot, where I would start, but that might vary with your ideas, hence the idea that it is hard to tell. The projection follows the idea that the complete object presents the challenge and not, as assumed above, the lower part. As some parts of the upper part move across the middle axis, this tilted cylindrical projection might help to start. (From any standard projection, while all polygons are selected, you can use the Assign to UV Coordinates, to get back to UV. (The base part might be brought back to its starting point later.)
The second image would be another area to start and get things “in flow” of the fabric.
All the best
Sassi
