UV help needed -> technique

Busterizer

I have experienced many problems with unwrapping uv's in 3ds Max. Last time it costed me quite a lot of time and frustration. The problem I am having is that i don't know which uv's are actually good, for texturing in Photoshop. I did quite a bit research on this, and i find that it can be done in many ways and usually it is recommended that you produce planar projections of uv's. But i see this as a problem when I need to unwrap characters and any other organic form that is supposed to be textured and later animated.

Can someone give any advice on how can I make uv's for characters so I don't need to worry about redoing all of the texturing and baking steps?

I did unwrap uv's manually since I didn't need to do any organic stuff, but then when I had to do it I used pelt mapping for characters which turned out not too give optimal result and has costed me overall quality of the textures.

Eric Chadwick

I'm not a character guy, but like anything else it helps to look at UVs done by others. For example... http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/street_cop_workflow_by_mashru_mishu?o=print

Also, Pelt can only work with sufficient seams. If there's an area that refuses to relax properly, it probably needs another split to help ease the tension there.

Busterizer

Thank you, very very much. The link you posted helped me a lot even in other areas. Funny how i missed this thing.

MethodJ

UVs are one of the harder concepts to learn. I created this Maya unwrapping tutorial that might help you, it is a step by step unwrap of a character. I go over using planar and cylindrical projections, laying out the different UV shells, and testing for distortion. The tools are Maya but the concepts should be identical to Max!

nufftalon

Man thank you very much great post!

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

I'm not a character guy, but like anything else it helps to look at UVs done by others. For example... http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/street_cop_workflow_by_mashru_mishu?o=print

Also, Pelt can only work with sufficient seams. If there's an area that refuses to relax properly, it probably needs another split to help ease the tension there.

Busterizer

In both links i find a term 'pixel density' used but not exactly explained. They both suggest having more dense uv's for face and upper body, which makes sense. But I am not sure if I'm right in thinking that it would actually be much harder to texture face with many polygons and retain desired amount of detail if the uv's are dense. Or am I wrong here?

Eric Chadwick

Pixel density refers to how small the texture pixels are on the model surface. The less unused UV space, and the larger the bitmap, the smaller those pixels will be, giving you greater detail to work with.