UV Mapping with shape keys?

[JoeTom (Ratteler)]

I learned UV Mapping on Lightwave 7.5. Back in those days we would model a part of our object, generate a morph (shape key) from it, flatten it out, do a projection of the flattened object. and then tweek the map.

May seem a bit arcane, but it gave us 100% of control over how our map looked and worked.

I’m trying to start a SERIOUSLY low poly humanoid model where the head starts off as a cube and is them SUB D to add details.

I turn the cube 45° so the front is is 2 facing planes. I want those 2 plans to be the left and right of the face with the back faces and the top being hair or a helmet.

The bottom face needs to be extruded to make a chin.

Is there any way to flatten out my cube using shape keys and manually project it?
All the slicing and an automatic UV tools isn’t getting me what I want.

[Nanoglyph (Lee)]

If I understand what you want to do correctly, after you flatten it out and arrange the the edges how you want, go to an orthographic view (probably front or down, depending how you oriented the flattened version), press U to open the Unwrap options, and then select Project from view

See below. Obviously I didn’t flatten mine*, but you can see where the item is in the menu, and how it creates (or projects) UVs to match the geometry in the viewport.

* This is for the demonstration of project from view tool only. The actual character has decent, non-overlapping UVs.

[JoeTom (Ratteler)]

Actually THIS is what I’m going for, but thanks. The project from view helped ALOT!!!