carrying on

i explained before that i will be continuing with this blog with more characters to be UV mapped.

my next challenge is to unwrap a character made by my friend.
i will be starting this as soon as i get a bit of time.

here's the model

first UV mapped character

for my first ever UV mapped character i am fairly pleased.

especially with the body. as you may have seen i had major problems with the head, this was due tot the fact it is a sphere, trying to flatten and unwrapped a sphere is impossible without either seams of serious stratching which is a shame because it is the only glaringly bad part of this map. like i've it is something i can come back to at a leter stage and hopefully sort out once i become a little bit more confident with my skills.

i have enjoyed UV mapping so far, it seems to be both extremes. at times it can be very easy and strangely simple but at others it can be the biggest pain in the arse and prove very difficult and stressful. so far in this blog i hope you have seen me develop some skills, going from pretty much no knowledge of it at all to at least attempting to UV map a character.

it was never something that caught my eye but now i have tried it it's deffinitrly something i will be paying more attention to as time goes on and i will be carrying on with this blog and challenging myself with new models to UV map.

part 2

I've carried on with the unwrapping of moom

in my last post i had shown i how far i had got, i had done the arm/hand and leg/foot

i am pleased to announce i have finished.
it wasn't the easiest thing i have ever done and i haven't got the best results but it's definitely something i can work on at later date.

next step was to do the main torso. this wasn't too hard. the model not being the most detailed in the body made it slightly easier for me.




as you can see this quite nice, all pretty smooth and the UVs flow nicely which will hopefully show when the checker is applied.

next job was to do the head, tongue and eye socket.

the head gave me real grief... it being a sphere proved very difficult. this was easily the hardest part of the model. you can see how difficult i found it when looking after i applied the checker texture. It was hard not have blatant seams... i think this might be why he is only flat colours and not textured, but who am i to say that? it's just my theory.



i tried a couple of different ways, like having it more vertically set out but i finally settled on having more even throughout, as wide as it is high. as you can see in the above image.

the final two parts i had to do were the eye socket and the tongue.
the tongue mainly staying within the model meant i could do the seam down one side.



and the socket was almost done for me, the rough outline was there i just had to piece in the circles inside each other.



so this completes my unwrapping of moom

next is to apply the checkerboard texture and see how its gone.







as you can see it's all pretty even throughout the body and stuff but the main problem just like i said was with the head.
here are some images of what i am talking about.



the front isn't terrible but could definitely be better.

the back isn't as good...




as you can see there is serious stretching and the seams are very visible. like i said this is something i can work towards to improve at a later stage.

its been a while

sorry it has been a while since my last post, i am honestly finding it hard to do both sets of work let alone keep up with the blogs for both as well.

I've had to rethink a few things with my other project which has just been playing on my mind...

anyway, no excuses! I'm back!

so last time i posted i said i would be unwrapping Moom.

here's our guy



i started to UV map moom, just like my hard surface mapping i decided to cut down on the confusion i would map only half the character then when i mirror it it will mirror the UVs.

i decided to use automatic mapping to split it all up so i could then piece it all back together manually.

this is what i initially got




so not particularly messy just a bit bitty and cut up in places (mostly head area).

from what i had learnt from my research i decided to do it in stages, separate the UVs for the torso, the arms, the legs and the head. yes wherever they are split there will be a seam but hopefully it being in these areas it wont be to obvious.

i started out doing the leg and foot.
the seams for this would be where the sole of the foot meets the edges of the foot and then the inside leg. this is because they are the least visible areas on this part of Moom.
the UV looks like this.



next up was the arms, the process was very similar to the one for the legs. the seams being where the palm meets the edges of the hand, just like the sole of the foot.
the other being on the inside of the arm.

the arm/hand were a bit more fiddly than the leg and foot. mainly because of the little bits in between the fingers etc not being connected, i had to sew them into place piece by piece at some points which was pretty long and monotonous.




so far this is all i have done but i will be continuing it asap.