unwrapping and uv layout

Unwrapping helmet was really difficult I had to split the helmet piece into 3 sections in order to try and spread the uv’s out.  Originally I had unwrapped everything into their own uv space but later discovered that it was the wrong process as we had to produce a digital foot print. I was not sure what that was at the time but now I think I understand is that if I produce various maps they would have to calculate to a total of number required.

So in this case for a high poly model the footprint was 4096x4096. As I was not aware I had created and uv mapped everything separately and generated maps for each piece. As a major setback I had to go back and recalculate all the uvs to try and fit the into the uv space.

I would say that at this point I had hit a major wall in my modelling, as this was another time consuming process. I don’t know if I had missed this on a tutorial because I don’t remember anything about it or even heard of digital foot print on any tutorials before. A friend kindly tried to explain it to me so I can get a better understanding.

I felt it was an extremely important issue that I had missed and should have known. I also tried to look up for some tutorials but found very little explanation or success on understanding what it really is. But at the end all I knew was that the uv’s would have to share the same uv space in order to make the requirements of the brief.