I need some help with understanding how to unwrap a character like this

Support Materials and Textures
1

I’m working on a similar character like this for practicing retopology and unwrapping in Blender, and I saw that it’s a common practice to pack all assets in one UV space, including the weapon. Before this project, I did my unwrapping in Zbrush for each individual subtool and now I’m just struggling to get the process and theory about packing all things together.

Essentially, do I combine all subtools in one, export to Blender for retopology and then unwrapping everything as is or somehow I should keep some of the elements as separate objects?

And if I have to combine all for the unwrapping stage, do I seperate them back when I’m done in order to texture them in apps like Substance Painter?

I’d appreciate some wisdom :slight_smile:

Note: Please bear with me for the newbie questions.

2

Welcome :tada:,
using one UV space or multiple does depend on using one material or multiple according to the usecase using different game engines or whatever… and if you combine them then why separate again?? I can’t yet imagine a usecase to make the double, triple or whatever work to jump between split and combined editing…

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3

Hi, thanks for the welcome and your response. Yes, in this case the character and his weapon must take only 1 and the same UV space. What I don’t understand is after I combine everything together, retopo, unwrap and then texture, how do I pose the model if it’s only one object and not divided to its original state of individual parts? I guess, that’s one of the things that I’m having a hard time to grasp when it comes to this pipeline.

4

When you UV-unwrap, make sure every part use the same UV-map.

Then arrange the islands as you like before texturing.

This is the most common process I believe.

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5

Posing an object means adding an armature which do transform the vertices accordingly… so you deform the object. See also docs blender.org manual animation.

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6

You can select and unwrap multiple objects into one texture/uv space without merging them as objects. However, I’m not sure if I understood your problem correctly.

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7

That’s exactly what I mean. Can you tell me where I can find more information (a tutorial maybe) on this approach since I can’t really get my head around how one could pose a model with a weapon when all objects are merged in one?

8

It’s basicly the same if the weapon is part of the body… just a longer deformed hand with customized rig:
Blender 2.82 Rigging Tutorial (In 2 Minutes!!!) or for a switchable weapon
Blender 2.82 : Rigging Weapons, Armor, & Clothing (In 2 Minutes!).

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9

This is spinning in my head so have a look here:
oneObject.blend (130.7 KB)

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10

Thanks for the dedication to help out! Very sweet of you. :slight_smile:

12

You don’t need to merge the objects. Select all the objects you want to be in the same uv space. Go into edit mode with them selected. Select all faces and unwrap. All the uv islands from the different objects should now be in the same uv map.

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