Head unwrapping - methods
polycounter lvl 5
For some time i had issue with unwrapping UVs for head and it made me very curious about where do you guys place seams when working on character?
Initially i always placed them around upper side of neck and going around back of skull but that always results with the face being squashed and actual scull taking up massive part of UV space. Another approach i saw was cutting underneath the jaw, going behind the ear and over the top of forehead, but i imagine this approach being rather bad when creating bald character.
My primary issue lies with nose always lacking details which makes entire face look rather low quality.
Lately on artstation i saw some characters even in marmoset preview, i don't believe they were using 8k textures, more likely 2k yet they face normal map quality was very high, there were no problems with texel density around nose which is usually the case with my UVs.
There is also possibility that my UVs are just bad and i'm not familiar with certain tools for UV Unwrapping that could help me address this problem.
all comments are welcome
Initially i always placed them around upper side of neck and going around back of skull but that always results with the face being squashed and actual scull taking up massive part of UV space. Another approach i saw was cutting underneath the jaw, going behind the ear and over the top of forehead, but i imagine this approach being rather bad when creating bald character.
My primary issue lies with nose always lacking details which makes entire face look rather low quality.
Lately on artstation i saw some characters even in marmoset preview, i don't believe they were using 8k textures, more likely 2k yet they face normal map quality was very high, there were no problems with texel density around nose which is usually the case with my UVs.
There is also possibility that my UVs are just bad and i'm not familiar with certain tools for UV Unwrapping that could help me address this problem.
all comments are welcome
Replies
here, as you can see in first example i've cut directly around the face. This allowed me to really adjust size of the UV island bigger for face, but at the same time resulted with rather ugly seam on top of head(It wasn't that much of a big deal with substance designer but still didnt feel right.
On the 2nd screen i've unwrapped face along with back of the head, but this made back of head occupy quite significant amount of UV space even though it was under hair.
I know that in Lollipop Chainsaw for instance, Grasshopper Manufacture completely removed top of the head since it was hidden under hair, so i know it depends on job really but i'm wondering if there's some optimal way.
I try to avoid too many shells as it can have an impact on LODs
Though, idea of slicing into as many islands as you need then stiching it together, i think it may work. Will give it a try.
you can of course paint over them in a way so that they vanish e.g. in mudbox or mari but you'll rob yourselves of the ability to just quickly tweak the texture in 2D, e.g. by overlaying a pattern. you'd have to always go 3D and those paint tools aren't quite as good and versatile as photoshop for some things.
anyway, here's a recent one from me. i've not done unique unwraps for years now, just keep reusing the same head and uv layout for more or less everything - like i guess most productions tend to handle it. you'd be surprised with how much distortion you can get away on organic surfaces anyway.
most game unwraps i've seen are very similar, some do angle the projection slightly upwards to better catch the underside of nose and eyebrow ridge. i just can't be bothered to render all my existing skin pattern textures incompatible.
Asking because I see stuff like this a lot but I only know the old fashioned "photoshop" way as somebody above called it.
Using same head and just creating different texture sets, i wonder how exactly do you transfer details over. Do you have genuine face basemesh and then just match it to the new sculpt you make every time? I doubt all your characters are clones after all :P
max has a fantastic feature to handle things like that. temporary welding of unconnected points. you will have to run a script to activate it in newer versions of max. will have to search for the command but it is still possible in newer max versions
you an also use it to straighten what i call banana fingers
you could argue you using the pinning and relax functions do the same. but not really. as they will hard pin the verts in space. while my method allows them to relax and xhange their position
the problem with that approach is, texture and uv compression are a non issue for vfx folks. while in games they are still a harsh reality
$.modifiers[#Unwrap_UVW].weldOnlyShared = false
Don't forget to Open the edges again and move them a Bit apart for padding
Sub Painter's weakness has always been its poor handling of seams. It has improved a fair bit since version 1, but not entirely seamless. That's why I bake character heads in SP and texture paint in Mari.
very useful script by the way. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks again for your nice words