I’m currently modeling my game characters. For the face I use a separate mesh with its own material. To do this, I unwrap it manually (that means I place the UV so that it sits relatively in the middle) and then paint the facial textures by hand in Krita using this exported layout as a reference.
My concern now is: how can I make some kind of “backup” of it? I mean, I’m afraid that when I’m working with the model every day, I’ll move the face mesh UV map or accidentally unwrap it and then I won’t be able to get it in the same place anymore. This would distort my face.
I’m looking for a way to recreate the whole thing deterministically without having to manually improve all the graphics if the UV has been shifted or distorted.
Are there any options? How do you do this?
The UV map data is always stored with the mesh. If you significantly modify your mesh, it will indeed probably distort or junk it up. But that’s just kinda how it is. Finish modeling, then UV map. It won’t completely reset or anything, unless you select it all and tell it to reset. Or completely delete the head and redo it with new vertices/faces/edges.
If you really want a backup, aside from just keeping a second save file, or a second copy of the mesh in your same file, you could also add a second UV map to the model, in the data tab of the properties panel.
Then if you accidentally select the head, accidentally press U, and accidentally click reset, then accidentally save, and accidentally close the program, so that you cannot simply press ctrl+Z to undo that, you can reopen the file, and delete that second UV map, and go back to the original one.
