New to UV mapping - need advice

Wilmon

Hey all, I recently decided to take a crack at another model and using substance painter. My model is based off of Adam Adamowicz's concept art from a creature from the Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles. 



I went about making the base mesh and making sure to map it before sending it over into Mudbox, because I wanted to make a normal map there and apply it to a lower resolution mesh. The model has come out looking fine, but when I go to apply a brush or material to the mesh in Substance painter, it became clear that I had an oversight when making this model. My projected UV's have not deformed with the shape of my model, and those areas are getting noticeably less detail. 



What would be the best way to go about rectifying this? I would rather fix the UV's to accommodate the shape of the model after sculpting, but I would also rather not stitch together a spider web in the texture editor in Maya. Thanks all!

ryebot

Like anything that gets messed up, I'd advise working backward in steps till you arrive at the point where things went wrong and try and correct it there. I'm not quite sure what the problem is, it's hard to tell from your image. When you say the UVs didn't deform, do you mean that there are gaps in your UV now where you sculpted, or the distribution of detail across your UVs isn't satisfactory?

Wilmon

Sorry for the confusion, my UVs before I went into Mudbox weren't perfect, a couple of seams I could work around or fix later, but the UVs were proportional to the model. After going through sculpting, and I don't know why I assumed this wouldn't be a problem, some if the UV's don't distribute nearly enough space to the faces that were changed. You can see on the the arm that that the pattern applied there looks fine, but move over to the chest or head where a lot of changes took place when I sculpted and it's fever dream.

 
These textures are just examples for how bad the UV situation is. I'll probably end up having to start the UV's from scratch. 

pmiller001

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking. My first instinct is to say go back to the beginning  and fix those uvs. How did you make them in the first place?

Wilmon

Well I took ryebot's advice and basically resculpted the model and made entirely new UV's. Pretty happy with the end product aside from needing to add in the membrane wings, but this is for practice anyway and I want to work on some other stuff. 

Link to final: