Pretty much everything I look at (with the exception of Cyberpunk which is all over the shop) use a layout where the head unwrap pretty much becomes square at the edges - the left and right edge at the end of the map. The majority I found have been like the third one, Tommy, with straight edges and the bottom too, but these have a squared off mesh.
Does anyone have any advice, or know of any tutorials, on how best to achieve a similar unwrap to the last two? My starting point has been a seam down the center stopping at the hairline around the forehead, but the mess that unwrapping produces is extremely difficult to mould into what they do. They have relatively little distortion and the resolution looks pretty constant. I can’t get the left and right edges straight without making a giant mess, and I always seem to have a huge amount of resolution on the neck.
What those images don’t tell you is where are the seams and how they were unwrapped!
I would advise you to watch all the videos on YouTube about basic unwrapping and UV’s.
Get a basic knowledge of the tools and what happens when seams are added and how to place them…
If you look at the UV of a basic UV Sphere…it is a square. If you take and cut off a section on the bottom ( neck) and add a seam down only the back ( top to bottom )
and use a basic UNWRAP > Conformal > Correct aspect you will get a UN wrap as you are referring to. Like this…
Because of it being a sphere you would think a Spherical Projection would be the way to go, but you will end up just rounding the original unwrap ( square ) … What a mess you will get…
The “squaring off” seems mostly to maximize texture space. As you can see most of them do use similar seams as what you mentioned (across the middle to the hairline) with some having the neck separated.
When UV uwraping the head you aim to maximize the texture space of the face as it’s the most important part (you can see in the Uncharted 4 example how the frequency of the checkered texture decreases at the bottom of the neck).
The uwraping method that you’re using is pretty standard, you just need to manipulate the UVs in the UV editor with proportional editing to maximize the texture space of the face. You will always get distortion at the edges when doing this, but it doesn’t matter much as these parts will most likely be covered by hair anyway.
If you want to straighten out a loop in the UV editor you just need to select it and scale 0 either on the x or y axis (you probably want to use proportional editing as well to somewhat mitigate the stretching)
