Thursday, 21 October 2010

UVW Unwrap



To start with an Unwrap UVW modifier was added to the face. Using the face sub selection tool all faces apart for those in the ear were selected. The division was given a cylindrical map property and the cylinder marker was scaled up and aligned with the midpoint of the face. A chequered pattern material was added to the model to help identify problem areas of the UVW map that would be stretched when the UVW skin was added. In the edit UVW dialog box the relax tool was used to help sort out these problem areas. Then the “select inverted faces” and “selected overlapped faces” tools were used to identify any areas that could also cause a problem with UVW map. These were then amended.

To mark out the ear area the polygons that made up the ear were selected. Instead of a cylindrical map like the head, Eric Maslowski’s tutorial suggested a technique called pelt mapping. This was attempted however Eric Maslowski’s tutorials were composed in 3DS Max 8 and I was using 3DS Max 10. The older version did not match the new version and made the confusing technique even more confusing. In my opinion it was over complicating a problem that did not exist for the ear on my model. It was decided that as the ear only really needed a simple skin texture and it did not matter about unwrapping it perfectly. Therefore I decided that the ear could be split into two parts (front and back) and it would not compromise quality in doing so. Similar to the face the “select inverted faces” and “selected overlapped faces” tools were used to identify any areas that could also cause a problem with UVW map. These were also amended.

The final part of Unwrapping the UVW map was to apply another Unwrap UVW modifier on top of the symmetry modifier. This meant both sides of the face did not have to be identical with the texture. Using the edit map tool the opposite sides of the head and ear were mirrored. The joining vertices on the face were then stitched and welded together to complete the map.






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