UV Co-ordinates part 2

Click on edit in the UVW Unwrap modifier. Now we want to treat the ear. We will be using the same process as before. Turn off the chequer map press M on the key board and turn off the blue and white checked box. Press L to get into left mode make sure you have paint selection and we are in face sub object mode and then just click and drag over various parts. Click on alt on the keyboard to remove any unwanted selection. Now we want to move down to map parameters. The normal projection methods will not work well because there is a lot of overlapping detail; we want to give pelt mapping a reference point, a way to flatten it out. So we have to work out the dominant direction which in our case is the left view. Click on planar and fit so the fit is snug. We now move over to pelt, the way pelt mapping works it pulls your surface and stretches it out, so what it is going to do is latch onto each of these edge vertices along the seam and pull them out away from the centre and as a result flattening out the rest of the shape. So, what we need to do is to define a couple of break seams where we can separate the mesh, because if we just stretch this out it will not completely flatten. Edit seams by singularly clicking on any particular edge or we have a point to point seam. Click on one point and drag the cursor to the next point and click it will trace a line from one to the next. We now have a nice seam where it can split apart a bit.
Edit pelt map this brings up a dialogue box identical to the UV dialogue box the only difference is that we are in pelt editing mode so if we click on individual UV coordinates here it wont have any effect on the mesh. We just want to modify this outer ring which is called the stretcher. Click on the scale tool, give us some space we also want to rotate the stretcher so that it is pulling the various parts in the right direction. Just gain which ever shape you want. Simulate pelt pulling, what happens right away is that the ear is pulled out. You can do this several times until you have a nice flattened shape. Now that we are done close the box down and the texture coordinates are assigned to our face selection. So if we bring back our material checker and zoom in we have a pretty decent coverage. There are some areas that need to be tweaked by hand. So go back to parameters, click edit, filter our selected faces, freeform mode and scale down ear as it is to big, in relation to the head.
Ideally we would like to fit the ear into the gap for the ear in the face map. However just using a 3D painting tool we could easily place the ear somewhere else. Lets just clean up the results a little bit. What you want to avoid in your UV layout is avoid ambiguous quads.
Now we need to look at how we can fit this into the head. As I click in various vertices, it highlights blue vertices on the face map which match up. It doesn’t look as though we are going to be able to fit this into the space as we will get overlap. Just generally fit it into the cavity .Not a lot of detail - select element and drag down to the corner. Turn on select element and scale the ear up a little. Now we will test that there are no overlapping parts or inverted quads. Move over to face mode, click and emptly space to deselect and to upt to select and inverted faces. We have one inverted face here because of ambiguous quads. Make it clear how the quad is formed jump back to inverted faces and it is no longer inverted. Go to select overlapping faces and tweak if necessary. Close down edit UVWs get out of face mode, and go to symmetry. You will notice that it is the same both sides, if we place the UVW Unwrap modifier on top of the symmetry modifier we can modifiy both parts of it. This can be tricky, go to face mode, element and click on the head, on the mirrored side. Click on mirror and drag it off to the side. Bring the two seams together and line up as best you can. Switch to vertex mode and weld the seam so that it is a nice consistent mapping layer. Click and drag and Control W – becomes one texture component. Makes a white line to show it is welded. If you weld two vertices that you don’t want to weld this can be fixed by going to select the offending vertices and handle one by one, or underneath options you can decrease the weld threshold. We now have a nice white line running down the middle. Now this is all done go to select element click on the ear and make sure that you get the right ear – drag to the side and mirror. Now we are going to set up into the format that you want. Underneath options put in your bitmap size. Resize the map to fit into the background. You need a small amount of buffer around the layout. Now we want to turn this into an image to take into photoshop.
Tools > render UVW template. Guess aspect ratio, or specify width and height. Click Render and you can see the rendered image with the seams as well. Turn off seam edges and you have a nice clean white guide to be brought into Photoshop use it as a mask.
Fill mode can be used to fill with a solid colour or shaded information or, normal information. This can be used as a starting point for our texture. You will also notice that it shows overlap in red, you can fix these overlaps. Shaded option renders out the image based on UV co-ordinates.