Maya UV's
UV's are a method used to place textures onto 3D objects, and they are as useful as they are annoying. The shape is made into a 2D net, where textures can be applied and adjusted in order to avoid any distortion.
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I started by opening the 'UV Editor' work space. I decided to UV the main body of the jetpack as it was the most simple object. I then opened the checkerboard mode, as this allowed easy visualization of the amount of distortion on the object. In order to fix this distortion, the shape had to be cut into different sections. This would mean that the texture can be applied to each section on its own, rather than it trying to wrap itself around the whole object.
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To accomplish this, I used the cut tool in the UV toolkit. I selected 3 different edge loops and cut them into 3 different sections.
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To edit the UV nets, they first had to be unfolded so every face could be viewed in 2D. I could now resize the nets to reduce distortion, using the distortion view to see which areas were distorted.
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I then applied this process to the rest of the shapes, adjusting the size and scale to make them correctly sized. This worked fine overall, but the spherical shapes on the thrusters were a bit strange and I couldn't figure out how to make them look right (I will come back to this later).
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Overall, this was quite a confusing concept and didn't make as much sense to me as the base modeling. I survived, but I need to spend more time with it to get more comfortable with it.