Need help with UV mapping with seams I'm new to Blender and am having a difficult time with UV mapping and was trying to add seams to unwrap things a bit more predictably, but I'm getting unexpected shapes and I'm not sure why.  It's a basic lathe bottle shape with a cap.  I was hoping to have top and bottom circle shapes and 3 rectangle islands to position onto the UV image.  But for some reason it splits it up into way more parts than I want and they are scattered all over the place.  The different projection types give me equally weird results and Active Quad never seems to work as elegantly as all the tutorials say it does.  The closest I can get is a smart Unwrap, but the points are not aligned so the art gets messed up.  The problem is, I'm so new, I don't know if I'm making a lot of work for myself or if that is just how UV mapping goes in blender...  Is there a dummy proof way to unwrap and get just 5 simple islands?  Or how to I undistort a group of points?
Apply "Scale" in Object Mode first.

Try one seam from top to bottom. Probably in the back so it's not visible. And a second seam around the bottom outside edge and another around the top outside edge.



You can then export the UV Layout and bring it into an image editing program like Photoshop or Gimp and arrange your labels etc. Then save that (Less the UV map) and bring that into Blender as your texture.



If your UV map comes out like this (Vertical) you can rotate the UV Map 90' just like in the Editor. "R" + 90