CGC Classic: Unwrapping a Full Human Character (Blender 2.6)

[Music] hello and welcome to this video tutorial from blender cookie calm my name is jonathan Williamson and today we're gonna be looking at how to unwrap the UVs to a full organic character now the character that we're gonna be using today is this fairly stylized female character that I did a while back and we're gonna look at how to unwrap the full UVs for the head the body hands feet etc and unwrap them and such that we minimize stretching and things like that in order to allow us to create well well-made texture maps that will display well on the model so the first thing that I want to do is go ahead and start out by creating my seams and seams in UV mapping allow you to basically separate out portions of them the model and literally create seams in the UVs just like you would have seams in fabric while creating a shirt or anything like that and allows us to control how the UVs are unwrapped onto a 2d planar surface and so what I want to do first off right now I do not actually have a mirror modifier on this model it's a full one-sided model and in order to create or make the seam process a bit more optimized and speedy I'm gonna go ahead and delete half of my model by just zooming in here and from the top view using B and / box select and left-click and drag in across the middle to select everything left of the centerline then I'll just hit X and delete vertices and then I'm going to very quickly add in a mirror modifier and zip it up to the top and we'll go ahead and apply it during edit mode so this way I can go ahead and add all my seams on just one side of the model have it appear on both sides and then once I'm ready to unwrap I can go ahead and apply my mirror modifier now do be careful when you win unwrapping with the with them your modifier on because you're not going to see the same results in the UV window here the UV image editor as you would if it were already applied so just be aware of that when you're creating your seams and so first off I want to think about how I want to section off my model since you know the human body is a very complex form there we can't just you know do a front side and back we've got a thing a little bit more than that and we've also got a thing about a couple other things first foremost is what kind of texturing are we doing are we going to be looking for a lot of detail in the face general detail all over things like that like with most characters chances are you're gonna be looking for a lot of detail in the face and pretty good detail everywhere else and so something that you'll see done commonly is people will create a separate UV map for the head and I separate UV map for the body and then commonly another UV map for the clothes etc and so the first section that we're gonna do their first scene we're gonna create is along the neckline to separate out the head from the body and then we're actually going to be using the separate UV textures to actually have a separate map for each of the head and the body so first let's go ahead and add a new texture UV texture and we'll just call this head and you don't actually have to hit the plus sign as soon as you actually hit you and unwrap it'll automatically add one if you don't have one yet so I want to go in and add a seam first around the base of the neck and another thing to think of when adding your seams is how can you hide it because every seam that you add you're going to have to texture over and try and make those textures meet so that the seam is invisible and so by placing seams where they're going to be hidden or whether that's hidden under clothes in areas that aren't often seen it's such as the underarms the groin things like that you can hide a lot of those seams and give yourself a little bit of play room when it comes to texturing and in fact sometimes it'll allow you to completely ignore the seams which isn't necessarily a good practice but if you're on a time crunch or if it's never gonna be seen or if it's completely hidden then there's no need to put in the extra time when you're honest on a deadline to try and fix those seams I don't ever be seen so the first thing I want to do is I'm gonna go ahead and create a seam around the base of the neck because commonly you know unless you are having a Foley new character or if wearing clothes that exposed the whole neckline things like that often this will be hidden by a shirt and so let's go ahead and we're gonna create a seam right along here and I can do this by using my Alt alt right click to select the edge loops and I'm gonna then go ahead and bring it in right along here and you can you crazy scene by hitting ctrl e and mark seam along selected edges and you'll notice that it now appears bright red to show that I have a seam there and in fact if I go and hit a to select everything and hit u and unwrap you'll notice that in the UV window I now have a separate UV lit island for the head and one for the body and obviously with the body you can see that there's some serious problems going on and of course the head in fact right now is only a single side profile so this is what I was talking about with au with the mirror modifier is because we want this to be a single flat surface with the face pretty much intact whereas right now we're just seeing a profile and so don't do any I mean don't rely on the unwrapping while adding seams or if you're not familiar enough with UV mapping to know where to place your seams then I would encourage you to forego the mirror modifier and work strictly by hand so that you can see the unwrapping process as you go but since I've unwrapped a lot of different models I have a pretty good idea of where the seams will go and so I don't need to test the UV mapping as I go and so I can go and help you and give you some hints as to where to place some seams so that you don't have to worry about that either but if you want to test it as you go and see the progress each time you add a new scene then go ahead and apply the mirror modifier if you have one and work on both sides at once just know you're gonna have to select every single edge twice okay so now I'm gonna go ahead and finish off the head so we're just gonna focus on the head first as we created it here and so in that process I want to go and hide the entire body and so in the UV image editor you just can't hit a to deselect everything and then while hovering my mouse over the the body island I'm gonna hit L to select the entire thing and it hit W to weld it all down to a single vertex and hit P to pin it and what pitting does is it locks those faces into their exact form like they are so even if I unwrap this again this will never change as you can see if I go and hit you and unwrap from the viewport you can see that the head has taken up the entire space but the body is still pinned down to a single vertex so that I can just move that over out of the way ok so now I'm gonna go ahead and switch over to face mode real quick and what's nice about face mode when you be unwrapping is that it allows you to select your mesh based on seam so or seam areas so since I have a seam all the way around here I can just with my mouse over the body hit L to select the sync let's select the linked and I will select only up to that seam at which point I can just hit H to hide it refining my my viewport so I can work with the head easier now the next place we want to do is we need to unwrap this entire head in a planar view and so I'm going to go ahead and I want to put a seam down the back of the head I'm doing it down the back of the head because it escapes keeps the face area completely intact so I can texture it pretty naturally and also because you're not gonna see the back of the head nearly as much as the front for obvious reasons but also because a lot of times most of the back the head is covered by hair and so I'll go ahead and I'm gonna select this bottom vertex here and I'll go up to the front and right about the middle of the forehead I'm gonna select that Center vertex there and hit W and select vertex path and edge link or topological will work in this case then this just helps me from having to either select the entire loop and then deselect all down here or selecting them all manually that's when I can hit ctrl E and mark seam and right now if we unwrap this again you're not going to see any difference whatsoever again because of our mirror modifier and so I'm gonna place just one or two more seams and then we'll move on to the body and then see where we are on on the UVs and apply them your modifier so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna add one more seam in here and what this seam is gonna do is it puts in basically a dart like you would see in in fashion design fabrics etc that allows the this area to kind of split off and it'll form a empty trying triangular area here which we can actually see like so and it helps flatten out this rounded shape of the head into a flat object without avoiding stretching I'm gonna do is I want to go ahead and turn off the stretching that I have here by bring up the properties panel and we're gonna bring this back here in a second I just left this on from last time I was using it so but I will talk a little bit more about that here in a little while okay so that's the basic seams for the head and so I'm gonna go ahead and do just one more and then move on to the body and the one that I want to do is I want to separate out the ears a lot of times you'll see people separate out in the ears of the head or the ears of the mesh because it allows you to work with them further since the ear is such a complex form even in scopes of an entire body's complexity it's very hard to get it to unwrap naturally without much stretching and so it's good to separate that out into its own island such that you can work with it on its own and so I'm just going to select this loop around here notice I'm selecting it right at the crease of the ear in the head so that if there's a seam there it'll be less noticeable and in the front there's really not much you can do about in terms of hiding the seam and so we'll just have to work with that when it comes to texturing so hit ctrl E and Mark the scene and if we unwrap it you'll notice that it's now separated these two out into their own islands and for those of you that may be confused when I refer to Island an island means a set of UVs so this would be one Island this is one Island etc okay so those are the main UV or seams on the head let's go and hit alt H to unhide everything and we're gonna go ahead and do the body so first I'm gonna add a new UV texture and we'll name this body I can type one-handed okay and for this we can go ahead and hide the head make it easier on us so we'll select it in face mode and I'm also going to select the ears I haven't hit H to hide it what we want to do now is think of how we want to separate this out I always like to always separate the hands and the feet since that gives me a little finer control and when I say separate we may merge them together later because any seam that we can avoid we want to but for the time being I'm gonna go and add a seam right here right at the wrist and I'm gonna add another one right down at the ankle just like that okay and then I'm gonna go ahead and think about how we want to split this or how we can unwrap it to create a fully unwrap scene or a model and so the first I'm gonna do is write down the int inside of the leg deselecting the outside of the leg and any adjacent vertices on the feet I'm gonna add a seam right there because this will allow the this tubular form of the legs to unwrap in a single flat plane and if we go ahead and we can add a seam all the way around the base of the leg just like this and wait control you to mark that seam and if we unwrap this now you'll see the leg here is now a very nice flat shape that we can work with we'll go ahead and do the same thing with the arm and we'll just choose the full loop right there so we'll mark that one and then I'm gonna put a loop on a seam right down the center of the bottom of the arm where again it's not gonna be seen much and we'll go ahead and Mark that and if we unwrap it once more you can see as soon as we oh I did the wrong unwrap is why I did cube projection we do unwrap there we go you can now see that the the arm is a single shape okay so this is getting better and better now you'll notice that the the torso is really weird right now and it will continue to look weird until we do a couple of things namely is I want to add a seam right down the center of the back and we need to be sure to deselect the front again I'm doing it down the back since you won't see the back of the character nearly as much as you will see the front in most cases you know if you're doing a a still shot where you're seeing her back and not didn't feel free to put the seam down the front you know you kind of have to place them based on your immediate need or the goal of the project okay and so right now you can see that there's still one problem and that is that this is this is getting all funky right around the shoulder here and this and we can solve this by just adding one more loop or one more seam right down the shoulder like this and now if we unwrap this you can see that unwrapped very very nicely now unfortunately that's kind of right in the center but there's not a lot that we can do about this at that current time so we're gonna go ahead and leave that as is and we will look more into it further but at this point I've done most of the major seams except for the hands in the feet so let's do that now and some of you may be thinking well I've seen UV unwraps where they have the entire body legs and arms connected and this is true and actually I'm going to show you how to do that but first I want to get all of the major areas set apart so that we can see where we're going and then refine it more and more as we go a little bit right now I'm trying to make you some I'm your modifier to get the majority of the seams applied such that when I need to go and refine it I don't have to worry about doing as much manual work now the way that I like to do the hands and the feet is to basically split it in half edge wives and fold it over on itself along the flat side of the hand here and so I can do this by going in and looking at my hand here and I can see I have this Center loop right here that's pretty much a middle point so I'll just select it and this will take just a little while to go through and select all these due to the various turning edge loops and such for the detail in the hands but I can select all this and I'm just using my alt shift right click to select all these loops and as soon as I get them all selected here in a moment you'll see what I mean okay and now on the pinky here I'm going to end the seam right at the edge of the pinky and not continue it I'm going to hit ctrl II and Mark that seam but I'm gonna go back and do the same thing along the thumb as rest of the fingers except for the pinky and then I'm gonna continue that all the way down the side of the hand right like this so if I mark that seam and now watch what happens when I'm just gonna select just this one area so we can see it full screen don't hit you and unwrap and now you can see that the hand is having a few problems cuz it looks like I missed a couple edges so let's go and look you can see I missed an edge there or two edges double check see if I missed any others okay so now we'll select it and hit you and unwrap and I'm missing another edge there we are missing a lot of edges okay now we'll try this for third time's charm all right quit doing cute projection there we go okay so now you can see that it's completely unwrapping around itself right here and right now it's a little funky just because it's we've got some overlap here but we'll be able to solve that a little bit down the road so for the time being we're gonna leave this as is since we've got that in place I don't move on to the feet and we're gonna do the same thing with the feet and so I want to choose this center loop that I have going through here and in this case it goes all the way around so it's very convenient and I just want to deselect all of the vertices on the left or you heard left side of the foot so I'll hit ctrl e mark that seam and unwrap that and you can see the foot actually unwrapped really nicely like that but I need to do a little bit more because right now this is all the the ankle area is getting a little messed up and so I can solve this by we'll just bring these edges in control you mark that seam and the reason I'm doing this one is this right at this seam here I could do it there but then I would have three different corners which with which to try and fix the seams whereas here I will only have this one edge so we'll do that again and there you can see it now unwraps very very nicely okay at this point I'm going to unhide everything leave edit mode and I want to go ahead and apply my mirror modifier because now we're going to go into tweak and so first going back over to our object data buttons on the head you v's or the body you've ease let's first with a whole head selected we're going to select everything and we'll hit weld just to get it out of there switch over to face mode and we want to select the head in the ears if I can and then we're going to hit or select everything and UV editor mode hit W weld and P to pin it move it out of there and then we can just hide that select the whole body and you and unwrapped and now you'll notice that when we unwrap since we applied the mir modifier we now have a very nice two-sided mesh at this point we can go ahead and add a UV test grid because we need to see where the distortion is where we need to fix issues and things like that and so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna click new and you notice it immediately gives us a black image so I can hit f6 to bring up my I guess you could call it the operator panel and we'll go ahead and make this a 2048 by 2048 map and we want to enable the UV test grid okay so now if we hit alt Z in the 3d view we can see the UV test grid applied to our mesh and right now this actually looks pretty darn good you'll notice that we're getting very little stretching there's a little stretching around the breast a little around around the bottom and a little bit on the feet and such although on the feet there's really very little there's just a little bit of distortion but we're not seeing stretching and another thing that we can do when we look for stretching is bring up the the properties panel in the UV editor and enable stretch and everything that is solid blue which is the majority is good to go and then you start seeing a little bit of kind of teal on it to green yellow and then red is the worst one general rule of thumb is as long as there's no green you're good to go which case there's not we see a little teal in here on the breast but we can't there's not really a good way to fix that necessarily we can maybe do a little manual tweaking by selecting areas in here and using the proportional edit with by turning on o and hitting G to move these around but really chances are you're not gonna be able to see much because blenders uvn rapper is actually very very good and does a very good job of unwrapping everything to minimize stretch as much as possible and so since we're only seeing a little bit of stretching here I'm not gonna worry about it and in fact in this area we can almost you know play into reality with us in that since this is an area that does see some stretching in skin and case you can almost get away with it and make it work with you now if it were right along the top of the breast or along the ribcage then we would need to worry about it but being where it's at we can go ahead and just leave it as is and this looks pretty good so what I want to do now with the body is I want to try and merge some of these maps because right now we have a lot of seams to try and texture out there's a seam around the leg the arm shoulders things like that now the seams down the leg down the arm we can't avoid those you know they're they're going to happen regardless but we can go ahead and merge some of these and so what I'm gonna do is let's go ahead and remove we'll just we'll leave work on one side at a time and see what we can do so I'm first going to remove this seam here along the shoulder and I'm gonna go around to the back and let's go ahead and select start here and bring these seams down or no actually let's do this starting here let's bring these seams up like this nope okay we're gonna do this we're gonna take this edge starting here bring this down which you'll notice this is kind of the seam between the muscles and the shoulder and the back so that'll work well into the seams cuz it'll tend to be hidden we'll bring these down hit ctrl e and mark that seam and let's go ahead and unwrap that and see what we get cool so you can see that this is connecting pretty nicely but we're getting some overlap here and so we'll go ahead and remove this top shoulder seam and see if that works in force sweet so there we go that worked real well we just eliminated almost two full seams we got rid of this whole area now there's just a little bit along the neckline there and the back of the arm where again you're not gonna see it much so we'll go ahead and do that same seam on the other arm so bring this down we hit control one to go to back view we can get a straight on view so we can see more accurately what we're doing mark that seam and then get rid of this scene here and now unwrap that and you can see both arms are connected very nicely we're not getting very hardly any stretching you there's just a change but here t knees bent they're a little bit they're not not anything to worry about and you can see this in fact if we hit alt Z to bring it in the UV test grid you notice there's no seam here so that makes it much much easier to texture you know ideally we would not have to have seams but of course it just doesn't work that way unfortunately so let's do the same thing with the legs now and I wanna you know since our focuses are only gonna be on the front of the character and since we have the crease along the buttocks to help us hide seams there let's go ahead and try and remove this seam right along the front of the legs so first thing first we'll just go ahead and remove that seam there up to this point and up to about halfway and let's try unwrapping that and you can see that's actually working pretty well but we could probably go ahead and connect this even further and in fact maybe we can connect it all the way along so let's go ahead and remove that and we'll remove that whoops I removed sharp rather than the scene and we'll unwrap that and there we go that actually works for a well so that worked very well in our favor to just remove the entire seam from the leg you know aside from going down so in this case we didn't need to separate them at all there we go and you can still see we're getting practically no stretching and no further stretching from what we were getting so this is working very very well in our favor one last thing I would like to look at and I don't I can't guarantee this is gonna work but we may actually even be able to remove the hand seams and feet seams so let's go ahead and remove those seams and we need to go ahead and bring these along so we'll mark whoops we'll mark those seams because this seam needs to be connected so that it can unwrap well and we can see that actually worked very well so again we'll do the same thing we'll do the same thing on the other side and then add it to the feet there we go and so even though we it was nice to be able to see where the seams were in the beginning so that we kind of filter things out it's now we're able to go back and reconnect things such that they work well and in this case I'm actually going to redo some of what we did earlier and I'm going to remove this scene here even though it works really well it would be nice if this was a continuous loop because this would be an easier seam for a harder seem to fix then one little seam here and for one this is along the bottom of the foot where you're gonna have a lot of calluses you have discoloration in the skin and so that's a better place to hide a seam than right along the normal skin tone okay and you can see that clearly something has gone wrong and so let's go ahead and look and see what we need to do first off I'm going to re-add the seam right around the ankle just to see what what happened so it's definitely something with that seam and looking at this hmm this one may not be quite so easy to reattach and so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to bring this seam up again we're gonna mark that and then let's try now removing that seam and unwrapping it again and see what we get and there you can see it's starting to work better we're getting some overlap here so we've got some work to do but what it's doing is allowing this straight form to come down and unwrap cleanly so let's go ahead and let's think about this this the bottom will pretty much unwrap like this we want the top coming straight down like you can see here and so for this to unwrap we need to think of it as if we were basically unfolding a piece of paper so I'm gonna bring this around and this up here mark that seam which then we'll remove this one and so this you know particularly when you're working with a complex form like this can be trial and error but once you get it it's it can be very very encouraging and well worth the work so you can see where it's overlapping there I'm trying to think on how we could solve this and it might be to just add in this seam here such that the bottom of the foot is able to come down first off let's see what that does okay there we go that's starting to work better but having done that we could probably go ahead and in fact we are missing here we go now we're missing that chunk and so let's go ahead and see about removing this seam now unwrap that and again causes serious problems which actually find rather interesting so we're gonna try something and this is a technique that we really like how this is all working and so let's just go ahead and select it all all the way down to the ankles and then we're gonna pin it as you remember pinning it locks it in place although I'm gonna leave the the bottom loop unselected so if we pin it it's not able to unwrap any further and so we'll do the same thing those ones as well and so now if we select everything hit U and unwrap we can see how it'll be affected and in this case it's very very small and it's very clearly not working so let's keep working with this I'm going to go back in and thinking thinking we're gonna bring this scene back down cuz anytime you can keep your seams straight do you know if you can make it follow the edge loops it will generally work in your favor and remove that one okay see we're still we're getting close it's just that we have the overlap here which we might be able to fix which using a tool called a live unwrap which you can enable under the UV menu it allows you by pinning parts of your mesh to modify it and it's actually it is looking to work pretty well so what it does is you pin a vertex and that will keep the vertex from moving so in this case these will never move but then if you grab that pin vertex it will interactively unwrap it around your pinning or around your mesh and so we can see here that if we were to remove this seam entirely because that actually fits real well in there then our issue is just the bottom of the foot and so let's actually let's swap this loop we're gonna first clear that seam around here now let's try on wrapping around the the other direction we'll go around the other side of the foot so we'll clear that seam select it and then deselect this area here and re-add that scene which unfortunately did not work in the least what we missed a couple edges there there we go there we go just like that so now since we unwrapped the other way we're able to avoid any of the overlap that it was wanting to affect I'm going to unpin that one vertex there pump in and then I'm gonna turn off live transform or live unwrap and we're gonna unwrap that again just in case there we go okay so now let's go ahead and mirror these seams on the other foot so we'll first mark this whole seam and then we will des elect these areas here up to the big toe clear that seam and then we want to remove these seams and so you know although that may have been a little tedious we made our way through it and ended up with a much better result and a much easier result to work with when texturing than we would if we were to just separate them completely and so now if we unwrap this completely you'll see that we have two very nice feet and just I just unpinned that and I'm gonna go ahead and try unwrapping it again just see what happens when it's unpinned there we go so it'll just help optimize that a little bit so we have the entire body minus the head all unwrapped as a single UV island and so that point I'm going to be sure to save my file before I lose something which I should have saved a long time ago and let's switch over to the to the head because at this point this one after we hit ctrl P to pack the island or yeah we just need to move just a little bit just so it's not overlapping any the margins we can do this now I will tell you there is one disadvantage to doing it this way where we have a single map and that is that you don't make nearly as good use of your entire image map as you would if you would have the individual islands um because essentially all of this empty space is wasted pixels and pixels that you're gonna pay for in terms of the image size and so you're not gonna be able to get as much detail as you could if you were making use of all this space and so if you have a lot of experience texturing or if you're limited to the low res UV maps it's a it's a good idea to separate out the islands like we did originally so that you can make as best use of this this space as possible but if you're not restricted to a small small texture size or anything like that then I encourage you to go this route as you will find a texturing process to be much much easier or the third route that you could do would be to use multiple again use multiple UV maps unwrap it once like this once with all the islands packed very nicely you would texture it on this one and then bake out that texture to your other UV map which would frankly probably be the best route because you would get best of both worlds but I'm not gonna go any further into that as that's for its own tutorial but if if that sounds of interest to you then please leave a comment on on the thread here on the post and if there's enough of a response that I will definitely look into that and see what we can do about bringing that into a tutorial or a tip of its own at this point I want to go ahead and move on to the head and just for one last check let's go ahead and hit alt Z and look at our very nice fully unwrapped figure so at this point we're ready to do the head so I'm going to switch back over to the head UV texture and hit alt H hit ctrl tab and face mode select the face and then hit shift H to hide everything else in remember you can select it by hitting hitting L and at this point we haven't unwrapped with the mirror modifier on so let's first just hit you and unwrap and we can see that and I realized also forgot the ear so we're gonna hit alt H and I want to select the ears the head and then I'll hit shift H to hide everything else and I'll hit you and unwrap okay so we're going to ignore the ears for the time beam because we want to focus on the head and so I'm going to bring in that that UV test grid and it alt C and let's look at this so outside of edit mode you can see that we've got some problems to resolve namely the neck which is wonderfully unwrapped you're seeing no distortion as you should since it's a very circular form a tubular form but then we're not seeing we're seeing some stretching in here these tiles are way bigger than these ones so you're seeing a lot of distortion and frankly we want the most detail in the face and so the way that I'm gonna fix this is you know you may get lucky and that your head just unwraps perfectly but chances are due to the neck areas you're not going to and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the pinning feature to first unwrap just a portion of my face by going into edge mode I'm gonna set a loop right around the primary face area so right in here in fact actually I'm going to go in one more loop here by selecting those edges in edge mode hit ctrl e mark that seam and then I'll go ahead and go back to face mode select that area and hit U and unwrap and what that does is that optimizes it for this area such that it's as good as it can be basically you'll notice there's a little distortion in the nose but unfortunately without adding some seams in there and then dealing with overlap really not gonna fix that and that's okay you know we we really don't need to worry about that too much because you know that part of the nose is gonna tend to be stretched a little bit it's tighter skin and so we can probably leave it as is it's not gonna be our number one concern at this point anyway you know maybe we could fix it a little bit by going into face mode select it and maybe turn on proportional editing and scale it down a little bit or actually we would scale it up and do just a little bit of tweaking trying to work with both sides at the same time you just want to be careful on how you tweak it so as to so to not cause even further stretching and so you know we can do just a little bit of tweaking but again be be careful on what you do so as to not cause more problems in your solving as you can see you know as I modify by this I'm getting a lot a lot more stretching than I normally would but as long as it's you know still looking nice and clean on here then we're pretty much good to go like I said you know my general of thumb is that as long as there's no green I don't worry about it and that may be good may be bad but I found it to work pretty well and maybe we can fix some of that area since this is a crease right here it's probably better that the distorted face be here which is right here rather than along this surface and so at that point I'm gonna go and leave that as is definitely find it a little bit more and now I want to select that area again and we're gonna select this entire island and hit P to pin it so we're again remember that that is locking the entire thing in place such that it can't be modified and so now if I select the entire head I'm going to first go back into edge mode remove these seams such as they don't unwrap as one model again and now hit you and unwrap and I can select everything and hit control P to pack the island since it was overlapping the ears and we get a much much cleaner result and so even though the the neck is still smaller we can you know we can probably leave it as is or if you're okay with the scenes which going back to the method that I mentioned a little bit ago uh oops not what I meant there we go using the baking method to remove seams and packing to new islands we can be a little bit more lenient with where we place seems so for example if I want to fix this neck just a little bit if I add a loop right down the center and unwrap that and we'll go ahead and select everything hit ctrl P and I'm also going to select both ears just for the time being and hit P just so it doesn't keep overlapping them and now you can see that with that there I've kind of scaled down the neck just a little bit and done that but we do now have a seam going straight down the middle and so for this purpose I'm gonna go ahead and remove that seam as since the head is has a full map to itself I'm not concerned about small differences in the size here as I've still got you know assuming that I'm working with a decently sized map I've still got plenty to work with if you're doing really fine sculpting you may want to look into getting this a little cleaner but for the time being I'm gonna go ahead and leave it as is one thing I will give you a tip on if you want to play with it ways to help remove stretching or things like that are to put in darts or be single edges like this or multiple edges but small in cuts so I mark that seam there and then I unwrap it and although it's a bad case here you can see that it's now added in that Dart and so since it's overlapped that pretty much tells you that oh okay I don't want to do it there but that's essentially what we did around the forehead sometimes you'll see people do it along the bottom of the chin or jawline things like that but we're gonna leave it as is so I want to go ahead and work with the ears a little bit so I'm gonna select the ears and unpin them select everything and hit control a and that averages the island scales such that they they fit their size relative to the size of the actual model as you can see with the UV texture now now that the ears are one of those areas since it's such a complex form you're almost guaranteed to get some stretching in there but we can get rid of some of it and so what I'm gonna do is I want to fold the ear over like I did on on the hands and the feet and so I'm gonna bring it in right along here getting rid of these vertices here and I'm going to let it unfold the back edge and so let's just bring that all the way around mark that and see what we get I'm gonna do this from face mode now so I can select just it well unwrap it and you can see that that's now working much much better although you immediately notice that since we have to complete several islands we now have two separate areas to unwrap and this was not that may intent because I want this to just fold over and so what I'll do is I can just remove a couple of these seams along the straighter portion of the ear just clear that scene and now from face mode if I select it and hit U and unwrap you'll see that I have one complete unwrap and with not too much stretching you know working very little green the Greens just on the inside of the ear couple areas in here where it's pinching we're starting to get it just a tenth of green but again those are areas that we don't really need to worry about so I'm gonna go ahead and leave that as is and so let's select everything again and hit U and unwrap select everything and hit control a to average the island scale and I can control P to pack the islands such that it moves them in place oh and I forgot to go ahead and and those seams on the other ear so I'm gonna just switch over to side view and I can see my duplicate areas so I'll just select those and select these so basically I'm selecting over my seams such that it selects through to the other side mark that unwrap it again it's like everything control a and ctrl P Oh control a and control P in the UV window and there we go so that unwraps the entire head at which point we can turn off the stretching so that we can see our area better we can maybe turn on a different UV view and there we have it maybe we'll select everything again which seemingly a is not working and way alt P and I know that a does work it has to do with the different modes that you're in I do believe there you go in face mode I'm able to select everything with a in vertex mode I am not so just something to keep in mind or at least to watch for if you run into trouble and so at this point I'm pretty much gonna leave it as is although I like to generally move the move the different areas around to fit them in place where they would go so maybe I'll move this one over here a little bit this one here I like to keep them about the same rotation such that if I want it I can just duplicate their texture Maps over and we'll make this fit a little better so much going to rotate it further around there we go move it over do the same thing with this one just to make it a little better use on a little better organization and that's it so this point we have a fully unwrapped character which you can see if we hit alt Z we've got the head here the body there and we're good to go so this was this whole tutorial was on unwrapping a full full human stylized human body but a full body unwrapping the UVs and going from there so at this point you're pretty much ready to start texturing and to export the UVs you simply go to you V's export UV face lamps save it out open it up in Photoshop or your painting application of choice if you're an open open-source guru and have at it so I hope you enjoyed this thanks for watching and if you have any questions again never never hesitate to submit a support ticket through our support page at Zendesk or by just adding a comment on the post so again I will see you next time and thanks for watching you

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 31,039

Keywords: CG Cookie, Classic, Tutorial, Education, Blender, 2.6, 3D, Training, Jonathan Williamson, modeling, uvs, unwrap, texture, human, bipedal, female

Id: y8vZraSY3ZE

Length: 46min 13sec (2773 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 03 2019