UV Unwrapping the Player Ship

 At this stage in my workflow, with my player ship model complete.
I exported the Player Ship as an .obj file and then imported it into Zbrush 4.0.
The purpose of doing this is that Zbrush has a rather nifty plugin that allows meshes (from simple to complex) to be automatically unwrapped in a tangible and understable manner. 

 This plugin is called UV-Master can be obtained from here.

Simply place the plugin with ZBrush's plugin folder contained within the installation folder.

The fruits of such labour can be seen below.
The below UV map allows for consistent application of accurate textures onto the 3D model.
This will prove to be especially useful in creating aestheticly pleasing textures that will allow further development when considering the application of vertical displacement maps and normal maps.

The UV Master plugin allows the user to 'paint' areas that require to be preserved and allow a quick and easy function for the user to also 'paint' where the seams will exist on the UV map for the model. This aspect of ZBrush really astounded me in how it cut many hours out of the workflow for this section and allowed a much faster transition between the production stages.

 

Now this is where I encountered a multitude of problems within ZBrush.

For some reason I just could not get to grips with the general functions of the program and found the HCI aspect of using the program to be quite encumbersome at times.

 In terms of the quality of results when sculpting within ZBrush I was very impressed however its operation on an interaction level began to really grate me after a while and that is when I began to look into an alternative approach to producing my vertical displacement/normal maps.