UV Unwrapping a Boat Hull

[CodyBrown]

i have a boat hull section that i am trying to unwrap and have been struggling with for days now, any help would be appreciated.

we only paint certain sections of a boat hull since quite a bit of it will be underwater the majority of the time, so i split the object surface to get just the area we paint. i can apply paint to that just fine, but we also paint graphics on the sides of our boats that run all the way down it and sometimes wrap the nose.

with the object being CAD data from Siemens NX, i have to unwrap it to hopefully get good UV coordinates. with the nose of the boat being a fillet from CAD, i cant get a continuous line running around the front when setting the direction guide. it wants to jump up a little bit and then continue around. if i let it do that it turns the object all white and gives me no UV map (attached images).

if i stop it right before it jumps up around the nose, i get results that follow the bottom edge where i need my painted boot stripe to run, but once they get to the front they become unpredictable and wild (other images). and most of our graphics are more complex than just a boot stripe requiring more graphics up the side of the hull. unwrapping like this follows the lower section fine until the front, but farther up the side of the hull the UV map gets squiggly.

i also have access to blender, but the unwrapped UV map i exported from there is so complex i cant zoom in far enough to get clear spots to create the graphic in another program and a apply it in photoshop and re-wrap.

everything i learned about keyshot and blender has all been from tutorials, manuals, and forums so if anybody has a good way to achieve what i need in either program any help or pointers is really appreciated!

Thanks!
-Cody

[INNEO_MWo]

Two things:
The front silhouette need a seem as well.
Re-tessellate the hull to get a get a more balanced polygon mesh.