Hi,
I was trying to really simply create a fast UVUnwrap of my human figure mesh using Project From View (it’s only the face I wanted to do a low res texture on)
It’s worked - viewing the figure mesh straight on and doing the Project From View gave me what looked like the perfect unwrap for what I wanted, but the reverse of the mesh is having the texture image applied to it as well.
I was hoping I could do something like select the faces at the front of the figure, unwrap those from view, then select the faces from the back, switch to rear view and unwrap again - but keeping the first UV map. Then I’d have a flat front and back that I can work with.
But as soon as I unwrap the back, the front unwrap gets lost - can I save/store this first one so that they can be combined?
thanks!
It is possible to have several UV-mappings on the same mesh, but you probably want to do something simpler first, like marking a seem and use the simpler Unwrap. There are a lot of options in Blender that does not generally usefull, I think that Project From View is one of them. If you need the UV-map for exporting to an external engine, you anyhow would want a map of all your vertices into one,
The method you’ve described will work if you add “projection painting” into the mix. In essence, you take the result of your project-from-view texture which – as you pointed out – looks good until you start to peek around the side. So you ALSO create a nicer UV-unwrapped version of the head, and you can essentially paint the results from the project-from-view onto the other UV map. That way, you only include the stuff you want (the front of the face). And then you do a new project from view (on the back, e.g.) and you paint those results onto the other UV map as well. And so on, until you’ve painted everything in. From there you can go into Gimp or Photoshop and clean up the texture, fill in gaps, smooth different projections together, etc.
This is a pretty common technique. A quick google search found lots of results. Here’s one video: http://vimeo.com/5093588
I know Jonathan Williamson shows this technique on blendercookie for a wooden barrel. It was for 2.49 but still worth a look!
Brilliant, thanks all of you for taking the time to reply … I’ll try these out on Monday