UV-unwrap cylinder (lightsaber) with extrusions / insets I have a cylinder with several extrusions applied to it.

Basically:


create cylinder
select top edge, extrude
scale horizontally (in x/y)
extrude
move vertically (in z)

... and so on ...


Simplified to 1 extrusion it looks like this:



Problem

The problem I have is the unwrapping. When I UV-unwrap it via cylinder projection I get the uv-map of the 1st image. However this is only the vertical area. The horizontal area as shown in the 2nd image is just a flat line which of course leads to a stretched image when a texture is applied.

Question

How do you properly unwrap that object? Using "Smart UV Project" creates rings from it. Which takes away valuable uv space. Isn't there a way to e. g. flatten the cylinder? Think of stretching it in length. After some investigation the most fitting solution I found was to do a normal unwrap and then use UVSquares. Or is there a better approach?

The full example with the problem looks like this:



Thank you very much for the help!
You might be looking for Follow Active Quads. This is a method of unwrapping (available by default as a menu option after hitting U to unwrap). This will unwrap the mesh based on the last selected quad (4 point polygon).  The effect is to create a totally flat UV map based on that last selected polygon. Usually you use it to (for example) unwrap a sphere to a totally uniform square of polygons.

Otherwise, I would just mark a seam down the entire cylinder (top to bottom) and do a normal unwrap.