Character Texel Size Optimisation Question
Hi all,
So I've been wanting to know the best way to optimize texel size for characters. My goal is to create a realistic game character and I have an issue here where on Unwrap, the texel size across the face looks clean except for around the nose area. I've tried two things seperately: Smoothing and Soft selection.
With Smoothing it, it distorts the UVs texture so I haven't gone through with using that. The closest thing I can get to a good result is Soft Selection, in which I select one vertex and expand that region by scaling it up with Soft selection. As you can see from the screenshot below, it becomes a little better but pulls the area around it. And if I go extreme with the soft selection and apply smoothing, the edges end up detaching.
I've checked the stretching and while everything looks okay except for a couple of UV islands, I would want to know how to increase resolution on particular sections of the islands i.e. improving resolution of the nose on the Face island or say the belly button area of the stomach island.
Any tips or tricks to solve something like this would be well appreciated. Thanks for reading.
Replies
I think you have the right idea. Some amount of distortion is inevitable in these areas. One thing you can do is take advantage of pinning vertices (hotkey P). Pinned verts hold their position when you unwrap. Typically use as few as necessary to stay sane. But on a face, for example, starting with what you already have, I would begin by pinning the border verts, and the loops around the eyes and mouth. From there, I would pin a couple of verts at the corners of the nose, and scale those. Would also consider cutting a seam down the middle below the chin to help with distortion in that area. You'll have to make a lot of manual adjustments to get great results. Live unwrap is great for this kind of stuff. When enabled, the unwrap algorithm works in real time as you move your pinned verts around.
Thank you @Brandon.LaFrance for the response, to be quite honest I've never gotten how to use Pinning on Blender but I see it goes in conjunction with Live Unwrap, like you mentioned before. I'm going to have to see how to use it, hopefully it helps somewhat.