Character and Narrative: UV Mapping

Today's studio session was incredibly useful/helpful. In previous sessions we had been taught how to locate the UV map of the prctice model and how to upload our own textures, but today we were shown how create our own UV maps for the models we have been creating with the help of Mat's video tutorials.

Initial UV Map 

When I first opened the UV Texture Editor for my model, I became very scared. The complexity of the lines made me feel that the task ahead was going to be extremely complicated, but once I had realised what I had to do it actually felt very simple. In order to make comprehensible shapes out of all these lines, I had to cut UV edges from my 3D model. I figured it would be easiest to cut the model into different limbs and components (for instance, the leg, the foot, the arm then the hand, etc.) and selected all the edges of each component that I wanted to make a cut of. Once I had done this I made an additional cut into the created shells so that when the shapes were unfolded they would lay flat, and to do this I made a cut down the legs and arms, through the feet and hands and one more cut through the head. 

Rearranged UV Map

 

I used the Unfold3D tool to unfold all of my shells, which created nice shapes. The only issue from here was that they over-lapped and weren't positioned in a way that would make sense to anybody. To overcome this issue I simply repositioned all the components so that they fit into the UV map and in a way that made it easy to understand what shape was what part of the body.

Example of UV Map in Use 

I found that this task was relatively easy to do as I was able to wrap my head around what edges needed to be UV cut in order to make shells that would be easy to work with. I found that the cuts I made were similar to that of the seams in clothes. I shall bear this in mind when I come to UV mapping future models, and we shall see how it goes.