Hello! I'm Connor, and I'm going to try my best to explain a few tricks I have for preset making.
Preset making can be a rather tedious process when it comes to working with gradients of any kind, this is because of the way the UV maps wrap around the model itself and how they have been cut apart. When making a preset, it is highly recommended that you use the UV Map references to help assist with keeping accurate to the model, this can be found in FeralHeart\my_presets\reference. Now that I've explained this, we can get into a few techniques I use to help me with figuring out how the UV map works.
Note: I've hidden the images under spoiler tags to avoid cluttering
Color CodingBy adding a layer above the UV and colouring the triangles loosely, I can create a reasonable reference that allows me to see how each part connects and where to. You can also do this to the back of the UV map to see where the back of the legs work.
ALT. Color CodingThis is another way of figuring out how the UV wraps around the model, though I feel as if the first one I previewed is more accurate and helps figure out the form of things easier.
BlurringWhat I did here was select the individual shells (squares/triangles) in the UV map and increase my selection, alternate to another layer and fill it in before saving it as a PSD file and opening it in photoshop. From here, I seleted and auto-blur option that ensured all the blurring would be even. You can find the blurring options in
Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur on photoshop.
