Help with UV mapping character with hard/soft edges
polycounter lvl 6
(OT: I love it when the server has a brief seizure and you lose the whole post you wrote -_-)Hey guys. I posted a few months ago about working on a character. Unfortunately the project didn't work out and I'm still struggling with this. I went about trying to unwrap this simple astronaut character in a way that 90% of character tutorials teach you how (the usual generic nude human beginner mesh): I'd select seams and faces, unwrap, relax, stitch, sew. Apparently that aint good enough. As you can see in the left side of the pic, the islands still have godawful distortion that makes me cry. I have no idea how to unwrap this guy. I've also tried multiple different layouts: I'd go into the beveled edges and make tons of strips for each beveled little panel in the armor. Still no dice. He isn't really dense at all either. The tutorials really don't prepare you for these kinds of things. Any help is appreciated.
Replies
however, what prevents you from straightening those pieces?
But for what I can tell your unwrap does not seems all that bad, you might have more cuts than you actually need, but in terms of distortion, a character will hardly have perfectly straight uv islands, if that is what you are trying to achieve. And depending on the texture software you are going to use, some distortion wont be problem at all.