Ok, time for another UV tut…this one is on how to use the new live update feature. This is maybe not the ideal way to unwrap this particular head, but it works well for the purpose of demonstrating the feature, so:
1—First make a head, and put a seam right down the middle.
2—In face select mode, press ‘U’ and choose ‘LSCM’. your head halves will load something like this.
3—adjust the halves so they are facing each other. you may have to use M to mirror one of the halves depending on how it loaded.
4—Pin some of the nodes by bounds selecting them with the B key, then pressing P. particularly pin the ones toward the middle that are close together.
5—in the popup menu, choose lscm live update so it’s checked, and then start box selecting the pinned nodes and pulling them closer together. The unpinned nodes will shift as you do this, optimizing the map.
6—pin some more nodes and do the same thing, so we’re ready to zip him up.
7—You can turn off the pinned nodes ( alt P ) and live update now. Box select the row in the middle and press V to weld them together.
8—go to image>>new>>uv test pattern, then select the head in face select mode, and with all faces selected, call up the test pattern. check for stretching. I had a bit around the corners of the mouth.
9—so i manually fix them by pulling the ones that are two close together out to the sides a bit.
10—and voila he’s ready for texture painting.
That’s not a bad tute. I never knew about the UV test pattern thing-- Jesus, does blender have a lot of hidden features. ^-^;
The one thing your tutorial is missing, however, is using the new technique to map orifices and ears. If you added a mouth and ears and nostrils I think people would really benefit more because those are the tricky parts when doing a head.
Maybe, concerning ears and nostrils, one could just try cutting seams and observing the “Islands” in the UV window to see how they came out, and if not, trying different seams.
All in all, this is much better than hunting down where things overlap and trying to get rid of bunches and stretches.
Great tutorial, it makes me want to try and do it. I have spent almost zero time with UV’s.
That’s not a bad tute. I never knew about the UV test pattern thing-- Jesus, does blender have a lot of hidden features. ^-^;
The one thing your tutorial is missing, however, is using the new technique to map orifices and ears. If you added a mouth and ears and nostrils I think people would really benefit more because those are the tricky parts when doing a head.
the UV test pattern is new in 2.4. Also, this isn’t really a tut on making or unwrapping a head. it’s just about how to use the new live update feature. Also, this head is a low poly game model, and the ears are seperate pieces. I just chopped off the head to use for this, because it had some interest to the shape and wasn’t terribly complicated.
