How to set up UVs for hair
polycounter lvl 14
Hey all. Just finished building the low poly for my character I'm working on, build the hair using poly strips and now I'm wondering how to go about setting up my UVs for all of the polystrips I just laid down. For my UVs I usually use UVlayout pro and tweak in max.
Do you guys have any suggestions for possible ways to unwrap the uvs for texturing? Thanks!
Do you guys have any suggestions for possible ways to unwrap the uvs for texturing? Thanks!
Replies
Don't forget to use mirroring where possible, that will save you a lot of space and time.
I never had any problems just using the default unwrapping in max. If your hair strips aren't attached, just grab em all and hit Relax then lay them out in a sensible way
usually a good idea to position them roughly in the same way as the hair is constructed as the model to help the painting process.
if the strips are attached, just hit Flatten mapping, then stitch them together as you like, and hit relax. shouldnt take long at all
Let me know if you have any suggestions... I'd like to set up the UVs so I don't have to paint each strand individually... but instead have like 4-5 strips of hair that I use over and over.
Without seeing the hair style its going to be hard to suggest much. But here are some general ideas:
http://wiki.polycount.com/HairTechnique
I know this doesn't help you now, but for future reference and such... :P
Click go advanced and under Additional Options click Manage Attachments and upload your image with your post.
http://users.skynet.be/arketip/arketip_morphMapENG.htm
More UV tools/techniques:
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryTextureCoordinates
You could also try Pipe Peel in TexTools http://www.renderhjs.net/textools/
It probably would of been easier to do the hair with rectangle splines, they create great UV's for this sort of thing. It's almost always easier to do a few pieces of hair, unwrap them and copy them around. It's a royal pain to unwrap them after the fact...
You could convert what you have over to splines.
Select a ring, click connect to create a loop down the center of the hair strand
Then in edit poly click "Create Shape", which will give you a spline
Set it to rectangle and turn on Generate Mapping Corrds, which will give you great UV's
Then delete the back faces and the old geometry
With a little scripting you could automate the process to once click.
Or you could apply the UVW Map modifier (not regular UVW Unwrap) uncheck "Real World Map Size" and set it to face. Which will map each poly to the 0-1 space.
to use as templates for UVLayout's 'copy UVs' capability. So dial in those 4-5 strips
in terms of flattening/alignment, then just select the remaining hairs accordingly that
you want to copy the UV's to...should be fairly fast and with proper variety you will
get away from too much of a repeated strand on the curls areas (depending on your
texture work).
In the future I'll have to make sure to do the UVs before I start to go crazy placing strips. I was having too much fun with the strip painting in Wrapit.
Much thanks, guys! If there are any other suggestions I'd love to hear them as well.
And that HairTechniques wiki page is invaluable. Love it.