Organic Unwrapping in Blender | Full Class + Free Gift

blender's UV editor feels pretty Barren the first time that it is open but hidden in there are actually quite a lot of very useful tools I want to show you how we can use blender to unwrap a complex organic 3D model such as a head that you could want to use for the main character of a video game this is a full tutorial on unwrapping within blender and we'll cover everything from the very basics of the interface all the way to answering very Advanced questions such as how can you mirror the UVS of an object without having to split the mesh into and especially if the position of the vertices of that object are asymmetric or how can you control the UVS so that they flow in a direction that is consistent with the curvature of a surface as opposed to fight against it we'll go really deep into unwrapping as a discipline and we'll learn how to evaluate the result that automatic unwrapping tools may give us and how to improve that result such by rebalancing the UVS in the zones of a model that the Observer is more likely to see these are Notions that will be very useful to you even if you already know the basics of unwrapping with blender or even if you use other softwares than planter to do your unwrap finally we're gonna end the discussion with a presentation of the steps involved to take a re-topologized and UV model and merge it back with an original High poly that may have served as the base we'll see how we can preserve all the details that we have sculpted on our original High poly and also preserve things like vertex color I promise that by the end of this class you will have all the information that you need to be able to unwrap any kind of complex organic model that you may be working on but that's not all that I'm giving you today this is for you I'm also providing you with a free face mesh that you can use either to follow along this class or in your own projects and a true blender fashion I am releasing this head under GPL version 3 license [Music] I've worked hard to make this an absolutely awesome base mesh that you can use within your own projects and it has features such as carefully modeled eye creases that can support a wide range of morphologies and eyelids with compressed UVS that unstretch when the eyes are closed face sets bordering heat Edge Loops such as nasolabial fold and eye creases these face sets make it easy to isolate part of the face when sculpting anatomically correct Edge flow around the region of the crow's feet for better deformation in that zone Edge flow in the neck that nicely supports the sternocleidomastoid extremely clean topology and UVS with minimal wasted texture space this glass and this head are premium content that I normally only released to outgang members on aogang.studio but it is my pleasure to release them all for free for you today you can get this head by going to outgang.studio and filling in the form on the front page and I'll send you a link where you can download this head you'll get a zip file that contains this base mesh as a blender file this base mesh has a zbrush file which also includes the poly groups in there and this base mesh as an fbx if the form Ever disappears from the front page check the description of this particular video for an updated link and if you're already a member of ourgain.studio you simply have to go on your account page and in the handouts tab you will see the head there that you can download Our Gang that studio is a platform I created to share everything that I know about character art organized into classes and chapters that not only cover the basics of the tools but more importantly how to use those tools to create Great Character art and how to judge the value of your own work I believe in taking the time that it takes to break a topic down layer by layer like an onion where talking about the tools of the trade is only the outer layers and peeling every layer off until we get to the core of understanding on the platform you'll find in-depth classes on how I have sculpted this head from scratch how have retopologized it and in the future we will cover how to create skin pores fine wrinkles and other tertiary details for this head and that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the content that is available on algang.studio but whether you become a member or not go on a platform and grab that bass head so that you can use it in your own personal projects or to follow along this class as we unwrap it together because this class is pretty long I want to give you an overview of the order in which we will cover the topics and you have comprehensive Chapters at your disposal if you want to jump ahead to a specific part of this class there are three main sections to this class during the first section we'll do an overview of all of the tools techniques and add-ons that we will be using to unwrap this head together we'll talk about seams and how to do a quick unwrap of a 3D model and depending on the importance of that 3D model that could actually be all that you need to be able to finish your on-ramp we'll talk about blender's UV grab relax and pinch brushes we'll talk about blender's UV straightening tools and a lot more than that this first section is targeted at newcomers who have never used blender's UV editor before and it lasts roughly 75 minutes the second section of this class will be a discussion of how to use blender's tools to improve the automatic unwrap that we will have done for this head how to rebalance the UV density and flow to bring more pixels within the zones of the object that truly matter to us this second section is meant to help anyone who deals with heads or other organic 3D models and would like to know how to get the best possible unwrap for that so if you're not interested in learning the basics of blender's UV interface but you simply want to know how you can get a better unwrapped result then you can skip right over to the second part of this class it's going to take us about 90 minutes to complete the second section and the third and final section of this class is how to do projection meaning how to take the Reit apologized and you feed head that we have completed and merge it back with the original High poly still add the remesh stage and how to transfer all the details that we will have sculpted on that original High poly onto the new plain topology and we'll also talk about how to transfer vertex color over at the conclusion of this class will be in a great position to start to work on the tertiary details namely the skin pores and the fine wrinkles of the head in a future class on algang dot Studio if you intend to follow along and unwrap this head with me go and grab the base mesh now so that we can get started let's do this just a quick word about this particular file you may notice that the checkerboard that I currently have applied on the model does not come with the file that you have downloaded and the reason for that is because we will generate this Checker later together when we explore an add-on called text tools second of all because our goal is to unwrap this head from scratch we actually want to get rid of the UV map that is already there so that we can recreate it ourselves later on as well so to erase the UV map that is currently here it's very simple simply have to select the head then go within your object data properties and you can see that I'm already on that tab right here and then go within UV map and in there simply click on the minus here to remove the current UV map from the head this head looks like Pepto-Bismol because we still have the Checker texture that is applied to the Head even though we have gotten rid of the UV map so I'm just going to go within the material properties here and I'm going to remove the Checker that is right here from the base color you won't have to do that on your side though because there won't be a checker applied within the file when you open it and finally you can see that the file in which I'll be working looks a little bit different than yours because I'm using an HDR that does not come with blender and I also have the high poly in there but other than that the low res is exactly the same so you'll be able to follow along step by step without any issues so there's two ways in blender that we can access the UV editor the first one is simply to switch our tab here on the top from whichever tab on which we are to the UV editing Tab and if we do that we'll see that we will be in a situation here where we will have on the left our UV editor and on the right we will have our normal 3D viewport that is there now this particular hair does not currently have any UVS that's why we're not seeing anything within the UV editor and it is using a texture that was previously used on the eyes as the background so that's why we have this particular texture that is here but we could work in this to create our UVS it's just not my favorite way to work or to access the UV editor there's really nothing wrong with accessing the UV editor in this particular way and if this is the way that you prefer to work then that is wonderful and I encourage you to continue to do so but personally speaking I would rather open the UV editor as a separate window and not disturb the main window of a blender that I had before because in this particular window the one that we have right here and we have our head we have our lores we have our hi-res here I've kind of already configured this particular 3D window to essentially be the way that I want it to be in terms of perspective in terms of lighting in terms of visibility of the objects in there so trippy told I just don't really want to disturb that so I would rather open the UV editor as a completely separate window and in fact even keep that second window on a separate monitor as opposed to have both windows the UV editor and the 3D viewport condensed into one monitor of course if you have a computer where you only have one screen then you'll need to have the UV editor and the 3D viewport on the same screen of course so in essence choose whichever approach that you want there's really no right or wrong way here but there are different approaches that some of us will have different preferences for so what I like to do then because I really want to keep this particular 3D viewport the way that I have configured it is to open the UV editor is to Simply go to view here and then afterward go to area and duplicate area into a new window this gives us a new window of blender as you can see and on the top left here we can actually choose the editor type using this little drop down that is right here and what we want to do is to Simply select in there the UV editor right here and this is functionally the same as if we had switched over to the UV editor tab because we have our UV editor window that is here and then we have our 3D viewport that is here because this is a separate window I can take it and I can slide it over to a secondary monitor so that I can edit my UVS there and come back on the main screen to see the result of that I suppose alternatively as a perhaps third approach as a third thing that you could do would be to actually split your main window here so just by placing my cursor and the corner until it changes to a little cross like this I could here do a simple click and drag which would allow me to split our main viewport into two separate views and in there yet again I could actually go within the top left corner here and then switch over to the UV editor this really gives us the exact same result as if we had switched over to the UV editing tab but once again it keeps all of the settings all of the configurations that we had previously set within our 3D viewport so personally speaking I would actually even rather work like this if I had only one monitor this probably would be my preferred approach then even to keep a separate window that is open or to switch over to the UV editor tab choose your poison do it in whichever way that you want let me close this particular area here and so because I have two screens attached to this computer for this particular class I will simply swap back and forth between the main screen and the secondary screen where the UVS are and if necessary I will do some type of split screen where you can actually see both results at the same time if it makes sense to do so here so of course right now our UV editor is completely blank and in fact we don't even have any tools at our disposal here to do any type of UV editing because we do not have any object that is selected and in edit mode of course so if we want to actually access the UVS for a particular object first we have to select it of course but after that we have to go within edit mode to be able to edit its UVS here so now that our head is selected and we switch over to edit mode now we can start to work on the UVs but if we look within our UV editor we can see that we still do not have anything in there at all and the reason for that is because there's simply no UVS existing for this particular head since we have done our re-topology and we have started from scratch no UVS have ever been generated for this particular heads right now there simply is nothing that we can manipulate in here so the fastest way we can actually get some data within our UV editor that we can start to manipulate is to go back to our main window and while we are in polygon mode here or in face select mode as you can see here press 3 on your keyboard to access that in fact let me also turn on our shortcuts here so that we can see what those actually look like I've pressed three here to go within face select mode and I'm going to press a to Simply select all of the faces of this particular object I'm going to press U on the keyboard to access our UV mapping menu which you could also access by simply going here on the menu here on the top and within this UV mapping menu we're going to select the first option here unwrap you can see that we finally have some data in here of course this is not proper data this is not a proper way to unwrap a head but it gives us UV data that we can see within our UV editor which in turn exposes extra menus and extra options within our UV editor so now we can finally manipulate UVS and explore the UV editor together one thing that is important for us to talk about right now is this little sync button that is right here you can see if I turn this UV sync selection button on or off you can see that it actually changes some of the buttons that are right here so it's really good to think about this UV sync selection button has a way to toggle between two different workflows to uv-ing within blender that are not always compatible with each other in terms of tools when UV sync selection is turned on you will always be able to see within your UV editor all of the existing UVS on a particular object without having to have anything that is selected with my UV sync selection that is turned on I can do a selection here within our UV editor and if I select here A bunch of random polygons and we go back here to our 3D window you'll see that those polygons have been selected on our lores just to make our lives easier here I'm actually going to switch the rendering mode to the solid shading mode here and I will actually isolate our head as well by pressing slash here on the numpad so that we only see the lowest here it's going to make our life a little bit easier for now so with UV sync selection that is turned on if I do a selection within our 3D viewport that selection will also be reflected within our UV editor if you're coming from other softwares Maya 3ds Max it'll feel right at home for you to see all of the UVS that is on an object when that object is in UV editing mode and personally speaking I actually really like to work within this particular mode for that particular reason but the problem with the UV sync selection is that it actually is very limited there's a lot of tools that do not work with UV sync selection that is turned on so sooner or later we actually have to get used to working with UV sync selection that is turned off and so if we go ahead and we turn it off you'll see that now our UVS have completely disappeared from our UV editor so our first instinct is uh to think that our particular object does not have any UVS at all but that is actually a lie what happens if you turn UV sync selection off is that within the UV editor here you will only see the UVS for the part of the object that is selected within the 3D viewport and right now you can see that I do not have any faces selected therefore I have no UVS that are displayed within the UV editor this is very awkward if you come from another 3D software this really won't make a lot of sense to you but hey this is how blender works and it's not all that hard to get used to it if I make a selection here within our 3D viewport you will see that now within our UV editor we only have the UVS here and I can actually deselect even I can do a separate selection in fact for what is within our UV editor but what we are seeing here the UVS that we are seeing displayed within our UV editor are only the UVS for whatever is selected within our 3D viewport so the best way that I have found to get used to working in this particular way with UV sync selection that is turned off and as I've said for a lot of cases it is actually preferable to turn it off because a lot of tools a lot of more advanced tools of planter do not actually work when UV sync selection is turned on so if you want to see all of the UVS of your object when you have UV sync selection that is turned off simply go to your main viewport and when you are within edit mode press a which will select everything which in turn makes it so that within the UV editor all the UVS of the object will always be displayed even if you click somewhere here and you deselect any of the faces that were selected we have what is essentially a different selection for our UVS within our UV editor then the selection that we have within our 3D viewport so I really just wanted to mention this right away because as you can see turning sync selection on or off changes the options that we have here and if UV sync selection is turned off and you have nothing that is selected within your viewport you will not see any of the UVS that you have on your particular object which will be a bit of a head scratcher if you're coming from a different 3D software okay so let's go ahead here and do a first unwrap of this particular hit because we need to have some data here that we can manipulate and explore together within the UV editor window our unwrapping algorithm gave us this mess because our unwrapping algorithm does not currently know where we want to have seams on our particular object so of course if we want to get some proper duties going on for this particular head we obviously have to start to put down some seams over this head so that when we are unwrapping the head we get a much better unwrap than what we currently have so let's briefly talk about seams how you can place them and how they will affect the unwrap that you will get afterward and for this particular section let me turn UV sync selection back on so it seems that we place on the head there's perhaps a few different approaches that you can use but it more or less always kind of boils down to what we will do here it's just like pulse there's really only so many places where you can place polls that make sense on hit and the UV seams are kind of the same there's really a few places where you more or less always want to have seams and those more or less have become standardized but of course different projects different artists will probably want to change these very slightly the most important theme for a particular head is the T seam that runs from the front of the forehead all the way down to the back of the neck and which will allow us to Simply spread open the whole head when we do an unwrap there so we want to create a seam that has a bit of a shape like a T So within our edit mode here I'm just going to press 2 to switch over to our Edge selection mode and I'm going to select the edge here that is at the bottom of the neck on the symmetry line at the back of the neck I'm going to hold Ctrl to select shortest path and I'm just going to grow this particular selection until we get somewhere around the front of the forehead but not so low on the forehead that we are past where the hairline would be so we kind of more or less have to imagine where the hairline would be for a particular character and we want to continue this selection until we are just a little bit behind where the hairline would be of course if you're working on a character that is bald then your character probably won't have any hairlines so ultimately you can do this selection more or less anywhere that you want but I still would advise you not to have a seam running down on the forehead itself because I will simply make texturing a lot more complicated there so this feels like a pretty good place to stop uh I would be behind the hairline in fact I could actually deselect one edge here just to make sure that I am behind the hairline this is a pretty good place here we are pretty much at the junction where we go from the uh top plane of the head to the forehead here so I'm actually quite happy here but before I create the rest of the tea we can actually Commit This to become a seam so to create a seam with this very simple open your UV mapping menu by pressing U on your keyboard and then afterward go to Mark scene right here and you can see the color of these edges will switch to red to indicate that there will be a UV seam and then to complete our T let's go from one side of the head hold down control again and let's select the edge on the other side that will be symmetrical to that so I believe it's this one here yeah that makes sense to me you could count edges if you're not actually sure about that but I believe it's this one here and same thing here let's press U and let's mark a seam with this so that's our first theme that we have created on the head we could actually already go unwrap this and see the kind of result that we would actually get from this so why don't we do that here let's press three to go to uh face select mode Let's press a to select everything press U and then let's go to unwrap or you could press u u to quickly unwrap this and take a look at this within our UV editor we now already have UVS that are starting to look like a face unfortunately they're kind of rotated here at 90 degrees this may or may not happen for you for some reason this is happening for me but you can already see that we're starting to get something that looks a lot more like a head here than what we had previously now if we simply quickly explore this you can see that there's a few regions here where the UVS are becoming extremely dense which is uh where we have our mouth back here because right now the mouth bag is still connected to the head and it has not been split off within the UVS so a lot of this particular zone right here where the mouth is is actually occupied by the mouth bag and you can see we can actually zoom in here and the polygons are becoming extremely extremely small so obviously this has to change and we're kind of getting a little bit of the same result here with the eye bags although it's not nearly as bad and we also have our ears here that are also becoming extremely dense same thing for the nose but the nose we won't want to detach it so we'll just keep it the way that it currently is so yeah in just a few seconds we already have done a first pass on the unwrap of this particular head that already looks kind of okay but as you can see there's definitely more work here that needs to be done so let's play it off then the mouth bag the eye bags and we can also split off the ears while we're there you don't technically have to split off the ears Sometimes some people will rather want to keep the ears attached to the rest of the head within the UVS to not have to deal with a particular seam around the border of the ears but since we have actually modeled a poly Loop that goes all the way around we're going to be able to split off the ear without having to create too much or any staircasing really around the border of the ear so I actually feel quite good about splitting the ear off and we also have a lot of tools at our disposal to hide that particular seam in the texturing afterwards so I personally feel pretty good about splitting the ear off but you could choose to keep the ear attached to your head within the UVS the drawback of that of course is that you will start to get less resolution through the ears texturing wise because we are compressing all of that ear Within a smaller space so the drawback of keeping the ear attached is that you have less texture density afterward to texture your ears but the advantage of that is that you have one seam less to deal with so there again choose your poison personally speaking I've done both throughout my career I've gone back and forth between these two approaches in this particular case I feel like detaching the ears so that's what we are going to do together there so to separate off the mouth bag the eye bags and the ears also very simple okay we'll simply go and we will select the edge that we want uh to split off so where we will Mark our seams and let's start with the mouth back here so I'm just going to zoom in here until we are within the mouth bag of the character there and I'm going to select the first Loop of the mouth that is on the inside of the mouth so not necessarily On the Border here of the lips because this seam here if I select this particular Edge that is here to Mark the seam to create the mouth back I feel as if the character opens their mouth there might be a chance that we will actually see the seam the seam could be a little bit harder to hide now of course characters don't often open their mouth and let's say that you are within a video game the game does not often pause to the point that you could that a particular player could appreciate that there's a particular scene that is here so Jupiter this team would actually be very safe okay but personally speaking just to be very extra extra safe in this particular case I'm just going to select one Loop deeper there but if you were to create your seam here I don't think that that would necessarily be uh a faux pas so to speak I think that would still be probably pretty fine anyway I'm gonna select this particular seam here because I feel better about this one and yet again let's press U and let's do Mark seam or if you want to do it quickly press U press M to mark this as a theme for our eye bags let's hold alt here select the Contour of the eye here I will want to select the border of The Chronicles this Edge right here let me hold alt shift 2. grow the selection select the top here do that on both sides and press U press M to mark that as a theme finally for the ears even though we have a poly Loop that goes all the way around the ear since we haven't split this with an extra Edge it means that on both sides of this particular poly Loop we have Edge Loops that will have poles on them it's not the end of the world really so in my case here I would actually rather select the edge Loop here that is on the inside of the poly Loop that we have created that goes all the way around the ear let's make sure it's continuous we have little section here towards the back that we need to select and finally let's do this selection on both sides press U press M mark this as a theme so that's all the seams that we need if you're particularly motivated I suppose you could actually split off the inside of the nostrils too it's a matter of personal preference but the inside of the nostrils really don't have that much volume to begin with since you can see that they really don't go all that deep there so just to save myself from having to deal with this particular seam in the future I'm going to keep the inside of the nostrils merge with the rest of the nose here but you could actually decide to split this off it's really not a problem you'll just have to deal with this seam here and hide the seam at the texturing stage later on okay so that's all the seams that we need so let's go to face mode yet again press a select everything press U press U to do and unwrap of this and there you go take a look at the result here within our UV editor you can see what it actually looks like so we have our main UV Island here for the head we have a much better distribution of polygons around the mouth around the eyes and we have those extra UV islands for the eye bags right here these are the ears and this is the mouth back we'll probably have to split the mouth back later on because there too we have polygons here that are becoming extremely extremely small but let's leave that for later this gives us all the data that we need to start to explore together to UV editor I suppose as one last step before we start talking about other tools I could actually select everything that I have here so here I have my UV sync selection that is still turned on let me press a within the UV Editor to select all of the UVs let's press r to go within rotate mode and then let's hold Ctrl as we do our rotation until we have rotated this by 90 degrees exactly as we can see on the top left of our UV editor let's quickly cover a few other important shortcuts and functions that you need to know at this particular stage first of all if you want to select UV Islands you want to press L on your keyboard as your mouse hovers over a particular Island somewhere so if I want to select the island here of the face let me put my cursor over it press L and now I have that particular UV Island that is selected if I put my cursor over another UV Island and also press L I will add to that particular selection and if I hold shift while I press l i will remove from my selection this works when you are into 3D viewport as well we've added a bunch of themes here so as I hover my cursor over my 3D model if I press L here you'll see that I'll also be able to select the corresponding UV Island L is a shortcut for something called select linked that you can see at the bottom left of the interface right now and so we could actually select with L using other parameters such as the normal which in this particular case would mean that we would select the whole object material so on and so forth but in our case here let's keep this on scene so that we are selecting based upon the seams that are on the object this works whether you have sync mode that is turned on or off so if I disable sync mode and I select my whole object here within our 3D viewport this will work just as well if I press L as I hover over a particular Island somewhere you can see that I will also be selecting it but when you have UV sync selection that is turned off you can alternatively also switch over to UV select mode right here to select Islands directly and the shortcut for that is four so if I was let's say on select faces right here and I press four I can go to select UV Island mode and now I don't have to press L I can just click on a particular Island to select it 3D softwares often have many ways of doing the same thing something that might happen to you that will be very curious the first time that it happens is that if I turn UV sync selection here back on and I am in face select mode as you can see we know where the seams are on our head and in fact actually let me just magnify this particular UV window that we have so we know where the seams are placed they're placed essentially all the way around our UV islands of course but while I am in face mode right here if I select a polygon somewhere and hold G to move it you can see that I'm actually moving a polygon and that polygon seems to be detached from the other polygons that we have on the head even though we know that there are no seams here that we have placed ourselves if we go here within our 3D viewport you can see here that there are no themes that have been placed around the border of that particular polygon so it is very curious to that polygon moves independently than the rest of the faces we would actually expect the vertices that are on the corners of that particular polygon that are connected to other vertices within our 3D viewport we would expect those to stretch and for this whole UV Island to stay as one continuous Island as opposed for this particular polygon to move separate from everything else I can do here box selection of other polygons press G again and you can see that the same thing happens so what is going on here this is very very curious well this is one of those limitations that we've been talking about about working with UV sync selection unfortunately when UV sync selection is on the moment that we select a polygon it will move independently then all the other polygons even though technically they should be connected together there it's a simply a very odd behavior of blender but it doesn't mean that there's anything that is broken and to better understand what is going on it is better for us to turn UV sync selection off so that we can talk about a particular function of blender let me do control Z here until we have all our polygons that are placed back where they need to be let me turn UV sync selection off in our 3D viewport let's press a over our head to select everything and within our unwrap window now if I select a face and I move it you'll see that now we're actually getting the behavior that we expect to get as we move a polygon around fat polygon moves and all vertices that are connected to it UV wise all those UV vertices if you will all move in synchronicity so even though we're moving a polygon the UV Island stays as one so it's obviously very curious that when UV sync selection is on that these polygons move independently let me do Ctrl Z here to bring this particular polygon back to its original location and the answer to the puzzle here is this particular sticky selection mode that is right here by default this will probably be on this shared location option that you have here I press a little arrow here that is the drop down menu you can see we have three options for this disabled shared location or shared vertex shared location will act the way that you probably expect it to work especially if you're coming from different 3D software but if I disable this particular sticky selection mode so if I select disabled here and we select the polygon yet again and hold down G you can see that now we're getting the same behavior that we were getting before which is that we are moving these polygons independently from their connected UV Island even though we technically don't seem to have any seams that are getting added here if you read a tooltip for this particular option you'll see here that if I put my cursor over shared location so the default option here the tooltip says select UVS that are in the same location and share a mesh of vertex whereas for disabled here it says sticky vertex selection simply disabled shared vertex says selectivities that share a mesh vertex whether or not they are in the same location so what does that all mean well shared location simply means that when you move a polygon blender will also move all of the vertices of all other polygons that are connected to it as long as there aren't a seam at that particular location or you could also say in another way that within the UV editor of blender all polygons all have vertices that are in a way unwelded from each other which some software called vertex face or face versus if you come from Maya you've probably seen that in there and you've seen that you can indeed select vertices for each polygon individually under certain context even though those vertices are merged with the vertices of neighboring polygons gets a little bit confusing I know but hey this is how it works so in a way all these polygons they're vertices even though here we have two polygons that are neighbors you can kind of consider that the vertices and the edges between those two polygons are kind of technically unwelded in a way and so if sticky selection mode is turned off blender will allow you to move the vertices connected to a particular polygon independently then the vertices of the neighboring polygons even though technically once again they are welded together this is kind of weird and certainly very confusing at first but so to make sure that you are avoiding any kind of problems with this make sure that you are working with you these things selection off if you are manipulating polygons and make sure that your sticky selection mode is set to Shared location if we switch over here to Shared vertex you'll see that we may get behaviors that is even weirder than that let me take this particular polygon let me move it out of the way here if I select the vertices that are connected to this particular polygon that is here you can see that I can independently manipulate them but if I switch here over to Shared vertex actually I select this particular vertex you'll see that we'll select the vertices of all other neighboring polygons that are connected to this particular polygon so essentially the vertices that are overlapping in 3D space and we can move all of those at the same time even though they are now existing in different positions in space this is kind of weird this could be useful in certain cases if you want to trade in an edge somewhere or a series of edges somewhere I suppose this could be kind of useful in practice I don't think will probably be using shared vertex in any sort of way and in fact most of the time we'll be using shared location the problem this little drop down menu is that it simply does not exist when you have UV sync selection that is turned on so if I turn the sync selection back on here you can see that we simply do not have that option in any sort of way if I move a polygon it is moving independently from other neighboring polygons but if I select a Vertex that vertex will move as if we had shared vertex that was turned on so the moment that you're done creating your seams and you have done a first unwrap of your head you definitely will want to turn off UV sync selection so that you can continue to work on this head okay so what happens if you accidentally move one of these polygons around and then you want to move them back at their original location if I want this particular polygon and I want to move it back so that its vertices are overlapping what am I supposed to do about that I suppose there's a few different things that you could do you could go within vertex mode here you could turn on snap and snap to vertex and you could manually snap these vertices back where they belong that's one way of doing it but this could be time consuming if you have a lot of vertices so alternatively what we could do is to select the edges that have been detached go to our UV menu that is right here and simply do a stitch on top of these or press alt V to access that particular function then we want to press enter to commit to the operation and our polygon will go back to its original location and if I wanted to I could do that on all of these edges that I want to stitch back together press alt V and then press enter to commit let's do the same thing with these edges right here select them alt V press enter now of course the question is how does blender know to move these polygons back within their UV islands and not instead move to UV Island to where the polygons were and I highly suspect that the way that planter deals with that is by simply moving whichever is the smallest island back to the largest island although I haven't completely confirmed that but I strongly believe that that is simply the logic here also just one last thing I'd like to mention at this particular stage within our 3D viewport you can see that I have wireframe that is turned on on this particular object even if I do not have it selected here even if I'm in object mode here I still have the wireframe that is visible in this particular object the shortcut for wireframe within blender is z so if I go ahead here and press Z you can see that we actually are toggling between what would be the Warframe mode and the non-wire frame mode if I toggle back here between those two modes that are right here which is what the shortcut C does here I'm really not that big of a fan okay of how this actually looks once we press C because well I simply like to also see when I am looking at the Warframe I like to also be able to see what the surface of the model looks like have a bit of a sense for what the 3D Volume looks like so just something here that uh I think is actually quite interesting to mention at this particular stage if you go within your drop down menu here for the viewport overlays there's actually a button here to also turn on as you can see wireframe and if I turn this on or off you can see that we have the wireframe that is displayed on top of the Shaded model when wireframe here is turned on so this is a matter of personal preference but personally speaking I would actually rather change the behavior of blender so that when I press Z on my keyboard it actually toggles this particular checkbox as opposed to go back and forth between the wireframe mode and the solid shaded mode that is right here so we're simply going to right click here on the little check box here on the geometry where it says wireframe and we are simply going to assign the shortcut the Z to that so that pressing Z will turn on or off that particular wireframe from the viewport overlay and then of course if we want to see through the model you probably noticed already at this stage but if we press alt Z it allows us to see through the model and the shortcut Z as you can see will still turn the wireframe on or off it's a question of personal preference but I prefer it this way because I like to be able to see the wireframe on top of the Shaded model but I'm not going to lie there may be cases where I actually think that it's preferable to manually switch over to the wireframe mode that is here and then also press alt Z to have the wireframe displayed while we also can see through the model okay so if we go back within edit mode and we take a look at the UV editor that we have in Greater detail you can see that the UV editor of blender by default is very Barren there really aren't that many options left and right so it's actually kind of hard to know what are the functions that are at our disposal to continue working on our UVs we have of course the UV menu that is right here and in here we do have a few options here it already kind of has the basics that you would expect there so you can obviously manipulate UVS you can do mirrors you can do merge and splits and all of that but at a minimum what would be nice to have in here would be some type of graphical user interface some type of GUI that we can click in to select different options for how we want to manipulate these edges these polygons and these UVs so we had to talk about two different add-ons they're both free and they will both help you tremendously to create UVS within blender the first one comes packaged with blender so you don't have to download it from anywhere you can simply turn it on within your add-ons so let's go with an edit let's go within preferences and within add-ons here I'm going to do a search in here for magic and this will show us the magic UV add-on let's turn that on and with magic UV that is turned on if we go back to our UV editor we now have a tab here on the right that is called Magic UV and there are a lot of different options that are in here we also have access to this if we go within edit and let's close our Loop tools and our B Services we could even offload those particular plugins at this stage we don't need those but we have other menus here or other sub menus if you will that have been exposed here that are part of the magic UV plugin most of these haven't been useful for me so far and really the reason why I'm telling you to enable magic UV is really for one particular function that is copy paste UVS this particular function that is right here and I suppose transfer UVS is also very useful if you want to transfer UVS between two different heads let's say this could actually be quite useful but they need to have the same topology the one that is especially useful for us is copy paste UVS and the reason why this is actually very useful is because this will actually allow us to copy UVS from one side of the face to the other side of the face and we will do that later okay so there will be a chapter or a timestamp for that later on if this is something that you are quite curious about but what magic UV allows us and especially this copy paste UV here is that it will simply allow us to finish the unwrap for one side of the face copy them over afterward to the other side of the face and it will allow us to do that without having to split the mesh as two separate objects mirror one object over and then weld it back together because as far as I'm concerned that's not an acceptable workflow to have to physically split an object in two to copy its UVS over is not an acceptable workflow and the reason for that is because we want to be able to copy UVS over from one side of the face to the other one without having to disturb the vertex order over the head that we have there are instances where that is something that we simply cannot afford to change let's say that this head was getting rigged or was getting skinned by someone or had been previously skinned and for some reason you needed to change the UVS after skinning was done there is no way that you could actually split the object in two because doing that would change the vertex order every vertex on a head has a particular number to it they are numbered from 1 to however many vertices are on a particular head and if you disturb that you will very likely completely destroy skinning or other things that have been done on a particular head so for me the only tools that are proper tools to mirror UVS over are tools that do not ask us to have to split the object in two and mirror that object over we have to be able to copy the UVS from one side of the face to the other side of the face without having to disturb the vertex order and Magic UVS and this particular copy paste option here will allow us to do that but we will do that at a later stage also keep in mind that we have modeled this head asymmetrically to begin with entering the class on retopology during the last one we had made the head asymmetrical too we had let's say moved the I around so that the eye is in a slightly different position her right eye as opposed to her left eye they're slightly in a different position the nose is slightly asymmetrical so our mesh is now not even symmetrical anymore anyway so technically speaking our topology is symmetrical we have the same vertices on both sides of the face so there is symmetry in terms of topology but there is no symmetry in terms of vertex position so even right now we wouldn't even be able to split this head as two separate halves and then mirror one over the other side anyway so I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole right now although we've already gone fairly far down that particular Rabbit Hole there but we'll come back on this end I'll make sure that there is a timestamp that you can jump to during this particular class to see how we can mirror our UVS for our head without having to split it in half and do a mirror on the object itself and that's all I want to say for this particular add-on we won't use it beyond that during this particular class the other add-on that we need is an add-on called text tools and text tools is the add-on that will expose that graphical user interface within the UV editor that we so desperately need to be able to see the functions that are at our disposal to manipulate the UVS and to quickly access them without having to always go through a bunch of menus tools is also free so we can simply go on the web find it and then download and install it so in Chrome let's do a search for text tools for blender because we have text tools for other software as well let's go to the GitHub page right here and where it says code here let's click on this little drop down arrow let's download the zip file of this I'm grabbing this off of GitHub to make sure that I have the latest version because I've seen other links online to text tools that were not for the latest version which at the time of recording this particular video is version 1.5 and afterward go to your preferences go to add-ons go to install right here and select the text tool zip file that you have downloaded wherever you have placed it on your computer this will then allow us to enable UV text tools add-on right here by clicking on this little check box there let's close this particular window let me press a here once again to select everything and now in here you can see that we have an extra tab here on the right that says text tools and that will show us a lot more options you can see here as I open these drop down menus there's even a tab here for baking which we will actually use later on to bake the Albedo for our head but more on that later what we want to do right now is to get a better visual representation for the stretching and the orientation and the density of our UVS both in the UV editor and within our 3D window it is extremely useful if within our 3D viewport we can see some type of Checker that will allow us to judge the density and the orientation of the UVS and also the stretching that we have over a surface So within text tools simply go and click on this little Checker map option that is right here by clicking on this you can see that the background now within our UV editor has been replaced with this kind of Checker map here with these kind of little crosses everywhere you can actually cycle through a few different Checker maps by continuously pressing the Checker map button that is right here within our 3D viewport the color of our object has actually changed because now there is a texture that is applied to it but because we are within solid shaded mode here we cannot see it here so let's switch back here over to viewport shading material preview and this will allow us to see the Checker map that is applied on the surface of our object by the way if you're getting some type of python error when you use text tools for the first time you simply have to restart blender to address that since we have everything here that is selected so that we can see the full UVs kind of makes it a little bit hard here to see what is going on because the whole object is selected so we could always hear just disable the viewport overlays for now so that we can see the object without having all those polygons uh be visibly selected there you can see by default the Checker that we have is a little bit low-res and uh it's also way bigger than it probably should be here if we look at these particular characters that are here these are obviously way too big here so it would be nice to scale these down here and to be able to do that we'll simply change within text tools here where it says size here at 512 by default we'll just use a different number in here in fact let's go up to perhaps 4K here so 4096. let's select that there and press Checker map here once again and now within our 3D viewport you can see that we have a much better Checker here and it does allow us to start to really spot the places where there's a lot of stretching and where there's definitely some editing that needs to happen to the UVS to get a more uniform textual density over our head here so these particular characters are starting to stretch here quite a lot the same thing is happening around the mouth there had the ear still been merged with the rest of the face that would be happening here as well and take a look at the mouth back here and how incredibly stretched the UVS are in this particular zone so we need to address all that of course now within the UV editor I actually don't really want to see the background here of that Checker map because it just makes everything kind of a little bit hard to read there so let's just go ahead here and let's just get rid of this particular texture here from the background what I would rather want to see here instead is a visual representation of the stretching of the polygons and blender has that by default so that's really wonderful that blender comes with this here so within the UV editor let's go where it says show overlays here click on the little drop down that is right here and where it says UV editing turn on display stretch and you can choose here between angles and area I think area is a little bit better because it shows you how much stretching there is into all of the polygons here and so the color allows you to see how dense the particular UVS are somewhere the redder it is the dancer it is and this is obviously a problem so we kind of want the color of everything to be relatively uniform which would be kind of bluish as a color that's kind of what we want to be aiming for blue science somewhere in there all of the zones that are red are the zones that correspond in our 3D viewport to the zones where there right now is way too much stretching or I suppose in this particular case the more correct way to say it would be there's too much compression going on within our UVS which leads to a lower than desired textile density in 3D so this is a really really great feedback for us to see where are the zones of improvement over our particular object and also while we're there let's go within our overlays yet again and under where it says here UV opacity we can actually switch this here from outline over to the option here called black because I find that it just makes the rendering here a little bit less violent perhaps find that that outline default creates these very bold lines that are a little bit hard to read so we can switch here over to Black and then we can also play with the UV opacity here if we want to lower a little bit the visibility of these lines here now that we've turned on these two add-ons you can see if I go back to my UV menu that is right here that we have a lot of options now at our disposal there are quite a few options within blender to manipulate our UVS and there really is everything in here that you could want to be able to edit UVS so as far as I'm concerned blender really is a professional UV editing tool but because of the number of options that are in here it will be impossible for us during this particular class to talk about all of these but we will talk about some of these once we are improving the unwrapped that we have for our head and so we need to talk about that but before we do talk about what needs to be improved in this particular head and how we will go about doing that and just want to show you two options that are within blender by default and what they do in in which context they can be useful so that you kind of have a really good picture of all of the tools that you would probably use in most cases to unwrap multi things and those two options within our UV menu are the pack Island and the average Island scale those two options that are right here I'd really just want to quickly talk about these so that you know what to expect out of these because these are very useful in a lot of different contexts in a lot of different unwrapping projects I want to talk about average Islands scale first of all and what this does okay this is very very useful because what this does is that it will make sure that all of the UV islands that you have over a particular head all have the same relative size to each other it's very common when we manipulate UVS to perhaps have a few of those UV islands that somehow have been scaled for some reason perhaps I have a few of those UV islands that are way bigger than they probably should be and if we look here within our 3D viewport I've just scaled here one of the ears up you can see that now the UVS that we have over one of our ears are much bigger so the texels are much denser in that particular Zone than what we have over the rest of the head and actually let me see if I can get a better rendering going on here let me turn off your DeWalt opacity so that we're not bothered by that and perhaps increase a little bit the strength here of our ambient light that we have in here so you can see the EVS here for the ear are much denser than what we have elsewhere let me even scale this up here even more just for the sake of it this is very common okay for this to happen sooner or later as you manipulate your fees and the way you could fix that at a later stage is of course to manually take each of these UV islands and then scale them down until they seem to be at more or less the size that you want them to be you could do that manually of course but if you have a lot of UV Islands that's a problem and also you are kind of guessing how big each of these islands should be in relation to the other islands that you have so it's not really exact that's where the average Islands function comes in handy here you see if I select all of the UVS that I have on this particular head and I go to UV here and I do average Ireland's scale blender will rescale all of the UV Islands so that they all have the same relative size now of course on this particular ear you can see that part of it is stretching quite a lot so there's probably some seams that we need to add to this particular ear so that we can get a more uniform textual density over that particular ear but what blender has done is that it has evaluated the average Texel density for this particular ear and has matched it to be the same average textile density as what we have on the island that represents the head there so this particular option here of average Islands scale is extremely useful when we are unwrapping complex objects that have a lot of different UV Islands to make sure that everything winds up being at the same scale this is really something we want to do later on once we are relatively happy with the UVS that we have and we want to Simply pack everything together we will usually want to do an average eye lens scale first and once we're done with that then we want to do a pack islands and let me select everything here and then we want to do a pack Islands on all of that to fit everything within our UV window here zero to one space and at the bottom left here you have a few options if I open this here we probably don't want to rotate some of these islands if we have already made sure that they were in the proper orientation so within our pack Islands here we want to turn off rotate and we could also play here with the margin to make sure there's a little bit more space in between these UV shells as you can see so I just wanted to show you these two options because they're very useful at finalizing the unwrap for ahead and if you are working on objects that are simpler then perhaps truth be told this could perhaps be all that you need to know to do to be able to complete your UVS and then move on to something else of course the problem with the pack islands is that it kind of relies on an algorithm to pack these particular Islands together in what seems to make the most sense based on the algorithm but that algorithm may not necessarily give you the most optimized result okay like we can actually see in this particular case that even though we did a pack Islands on this we still wind up having a lot of dead space in a few different Corners here of this particular unwrapped window if we're texturing this and we don't really care about texture resolution in the sense that we are working on an object for which we do not necessarily intend to show the unwrap but we simply want to have something that is quick efficient and that allows us to move on to texturing and we also don't really care about texture resolution maybe we're like yeah I'll just throw an 8K texture on this 16k texture on this then that pack UVS option will perhaps give you something that is already packed well enough that you can actually move on and not waste time having to manually pack the UVS together but of course if you're working on a production you want to optimize as much as possible that extra space that you have you want to reduce at a maximum the amount of debt space that you have within your UVS so once again if you're working on a production and you know that perhaps for a head you won't be able to have more than let's say a 2K texture or 4K texture for the head 4K texture is still pretty high res but for modern productions for main characters it's not unreasonable to expect to have a 4K even then okay a 4K texture if we have a lot of dead space within our texture sheet that will be a pretty significant waste of memory and we could actually get a much better result by spending some time to manually pack our UVS together anyway so pack UVS in certain cases it works great in other cases it may not be sufficient to get the best possible packing for your UVS but I want you to know that that particular option is there because there are certainly cases that you may be working on where it is totally fine to do an automatic pack of your UVS as you can imagine no matter how good our packing tools are we always wind up having some dead space in different regions of of our UV sheet in just a few minutes we'll talk in depth about what are the areas of improvement of this first unwrap but because I want to complete the presentation of the tools that we will use we have to talk about the tools that we will use to stretch some of these UV Islands to fill in as much as possible the Dead Space that we have around the UV sheet we want to straighten some of these edges here and that will actually be very easy to do if I do an edge selection right here let's say that we go from let's say I don't know here to here within our text tools here which is actually a whole host of aligning buttons that are right here and if I just click on this little arrow here that points towards the left you'll see that I will be able to take all of the edges here that are on the back of the head that create the seam on the back of the head and I can straighten them so that they are all nice and straight and so it's going to be very easy to take our UVS and get a very high quality unwrap that really reacquires all of the dead space under our main UV Island it's going to be very very simple to do with all of these aligning tools but also what's great about blender is that it actually comes with brushes that we can use in the context of UVS to move some of these UVS around we have brushes and we also have proportional editing of course or how it is more commonly called in other softwares soft selection if you don't know where to turn on proportional editing there's this little button that is right here on the top here if I actually turn this on let's say that I click on a Vertex somewhere and I press G to move that particular vertex after I have moved that particular vertex somewhere then I have controls here that I can actually play with you can see this proportional size is right here I can actually play with this as you can see to create a proportional edit or a soft selection and I can play with the fall off here if I want to get something let's say smoother here would probably be a better result so that is certainly a very nice tool let me do control Z here let me turn it back off you can also press o on your keyboard to enable proportional editing and if you do turn it on before you do a particular move or scale operation if I press G here once again you can see that now I can actually see the radius that I had previously set here for the proportional edit and when that is there I can press the scroll up or scroll down on my wheel here as you can see to edit the size of the proportional edit as I am editing this so I don't need to necessarily commit to the move operation before I commit to the proportional editing and as I do this move operation I can also press shift o to cycle between different follow-up types but my favorite tools are definitely the move pinch and relax brushes that blender comes with by default let me press T here to open the tools toolbar that we have on the left here and you can see in there that we have a bunch of tools here so we have grab which I keep calling move we have this relax tool here and we have this pinch tool that is right here so I really love these because it mimics quite a lot these sculpting brushes that we have within blender and that we had also used in the context of read topology here so using graph here and uh playing around with the brackets on my keyboard to make the radius here a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller I can also grab here let's say this particular corner and I can move it down and I can let's say manually straighten some of these here perhaps squish in a little bit the back of the skull and in this case too of course we also have access to fall off so we can also change the fall off on this particular grab brush here let's go to Tool and within falloff afterwards you'll see that we have a falloff profile here that we can also change so if we want something that uh I don't know it's on Sharp right now which uh certainly works well in certain cases smoother also works quite well in other cases here so of course the falloff has a pretty major influence on the kind of result that you will get and so this particular grab brush is really really fantastic to do these uh kind of smudging around of our UVS and we also have the relax here that is quite similar to the slide relax brush that we had been using in the context of re-thapology of course which allows us as you can see to relax the UVs for to relax there's really two modes okay there's uh the mode here that is called laplacian and then there is HC not sure which one is actually there by default but regardless they both have their uses you'll see that we'll toggle back and forth between these when we improve this particular head I do find that the hc1 works slower so it's not relaxing as quickly as laplacian does and it kind of gives us a different result here especially around borders as you can see as I do a kind of bit of a relaxing here for getting all these UVS here for the bottom of the neck here if I show you within 3D space what this actually looks like you can see that it's uh kind of creating all this kind of very ugly stretching here with the open border but laplacian doesn't actually do that it does a much better job at actually preserving uh or actually maybe not uh actually before we do that let's actually turn on here lock borders so if I turn on lock borders right here so that uh the border of our UVS do not actually move as we do this relax operation this laplacian here you can see it seems to Simply deal better with uh the borders of our UVS here you can see it's actually giving us quite a nice relaxation in this particular Zone whereas the HC that we had you can see it will have tendency as we have said to kind of uh for some reason just compress the last poly Loop that we have at the bottom of our neck here for some reason but in certain cases I find that HC kind of gives me a slightly better result other cases LaPlace and gives me a slightly better result we'll toggle back and forth between these and I suggest that you do the same just experiment with these and if one doesn't give you quite the result that you want try the other one perhaps it's going to work better the pinch here is uh kind of interesting can't come in handy in certain cases I guess we'll see how it goes of course uh since I am using a mouse here you can see that the influence here is very very strong moment that I simply click somewhere so that's obviously a problem so we definitely want to reduce the strength here on this particular pinch brush here and if I do lower the strength value here you can see that it's uh it's a little bit gentler I think but it can't help to just compress the UVS somewhere perhaps a little bit and in fact if we hold Ctrl we will actually magnify instead so that can definitely be very useful perhaps in the context of the nose here if you want to make some of these reviews a little bit bigger there I can actually perhaps scale this up here a little bit and then afterward do a little bit of relaxation on top of this here and you can see that we can actually easily scale up all of the UV vertices that we have around the nose here relatively easily with this particular pinch brush holding down control doing a little bit of magnify and then afterward doing a little bit of relaxation on top so I really really like these particular brushes and with that being said that's enough information about the tools I'll just re-unwrap this so that we kind of reset these UVS let's switch gears here a little bit and simply take the time to evaluate the automatic unwrap that we have and really figure out what are the key zones of improvement on it and then we'll grab all those tools that we have talked about and we will simply go to town with this we're not going to take any short quests here and we will seek to optimize these UVS as well as we possibly can so that's really Point number one of what we want to improve upon this particular unwrap all of the Dead Space that is right right here under the main UV island of the face if you will we can reclaim all of that space simply by taking the corners of the unwrap and stretching them until they are at the corners of the zero to one space of our unwrapped window in the process of doing that we will have to straighten all of these edges we also want these UVS to not be slightly rotated the way that they currently are and you can see that even if I try to rotate these so that the center line here running down the face is uh nice and vertical we still have some degree of asymmetry within the UVS so of course we want to also symmetrize these UVS as much as possible so what we're going to do then to improve these particular UVS will be to first to take all of these UV Islands here so the mouth bag the eye bags the ears we're just going to move them out of the way and we're really going to maximize the space that the main UV Island takes so we're really going to scale it up as much as it is possible and because this main UV Island isn't perfectly Square as you can see it is slightly rectangular even if we try to maximize the amount of space that this occupies within our texture sheet we're still going to have some amount of Dead Space over the main UV Island within our texture sheet and that will be the space that these other UV Islands will be able to occupy after the fact so those are all areas of improvement that are probably relatively intuitive for you but it doesn't mean that our work is going to stop there because once we have optimized as much as possible the space occupied by this main UV Island and probably before that we move these other UV Islands to fill in the dead space that will remain after that there is another thing that we have to improve in fact you could really say that there's kind of two main things I suppose that we really have to improve afterward one is of course that we have to minimize as much as possible the variation in textual density that we have over the main UV Island so everywhere where our unwrap is becoming sort of orange red it means that the UVS there are getting quite compressed which in turn means that we have a lower taxal density in those zones so we want to uniformize that as much as possible of course so we will seek to do that of course we will take the region of the nose we'll take the region of the mouth we'll try to make them a little bit bigger so that their textual density becomes a little bit more uniform of what is going on elsewhere around this particular UV island of the face there is something else that is even more important for us to do what's the Zone this particular head that really has the highest value for us we really truly want to maximize the taxol density it is certainly not on the neck and you can see here that we have texels here that are much denser than what we have over the mask of the face the zone of the neck certainly is not as important as the mask of the face if you kind of think about it right that's also true for the skull and the back of the neck right so if you actually kind of think about it right now the most important zone of the face where we really want to have the densest texels that we possibly can get is for the mask of the face right this is the zone that let's say the player is the most likely to see or the viewer if we're making a portfolio piece and this is not for a game the mask of the face is the place of the texture that we really want to maximize the density of texels as well as we possibly can this is actually the Zone where we actually right now have the lowest taxal density in a way if you look at the texture sheet and you kind of imagine that let's say at this particular scale okay if you kind of imagine that this texture was uh I don't know let's say that this was a 4K by 4K texture that we had over this particular face right now let's say that's the kind of texture that we wind up having for our face in the end the region that the mask of the face actually takes from that 4K texture how big is it really is it 50 of the texture I don't think it's even that let's actually take this particular Island here and let's just move it uh in the lower left corner and we kind of look at how much texture space this is actually currently taking this is taking about like I don't know maybe like a third maybe like 40 percent from the zero to one space on the x-axis and maybe sticking about of a third of the space from the zero to one space on the y-axis there right so we're kind of not even taking like a third of the texture for what is arguably the most important part of the face even if we throw a 4K texture onto this and we do not do any other further optimizations and our UVS kind of more or less look like this the mask of the face would probably have the equivalent of I don't know a texture that would be somewhere between a 1024 texture and a 2K a texture so that's a problem it's a huge waste of memory of course but it also means that even if we bake out a huge texture we'll probably struggle getting a good enough resolution on this particular head in fact we can't even see what would be the exact pixel sizes on this particular texture because we have here a 4K texture that we have applied so we currently have a 4K texture that is applied on this particular head now if I zoom in you can see that the pixels here you can kind of see them but they're looking a little bit blurry so let's go within the material properties of this particular object and within our texture settings here the texture that is currently applied where it says linear here we'll just set this over to closest which means that we will see the exact pixels without any type of filtering on the texture I have a 4K texture applied on this particular head right now and even at this level of Zoom we can see the individual pixels that are over the nose right now right that's really really really bad so there's always a lot of work that needs to be done on this particular head but even if I zoom in here a little bit at this level of Zoom I can clearly see all of the pixels around all of these characters that I have over the face right now so really a 4K texture probably wouldn't even be enough to get some really nice sharp details considering how small is the area that the mask of the face currently takes within our texture sheet we need to make the mask of the face a lot bigger in relation to the rest of the head on our texture sheet and we'll have to fight the tools the unwrapping tools of blender because this is the result that the unwrapping algorithm has given us where everything is balanced to be at the best possible average size that it can be considering the curvature of the surface in 3D space we want to take this region of the unwrap and we really want to scale this up here and obviously we're going to do a better job than this but you know we have to scale this up so that the mask of the face takes a much bigger portion of the texture sheet that we have once we have scaled up the mask of the face so that it takes a little bit more space in here then we'll adjust the rest of this particular UV Island so that it fits within the remaining space of our texture and after that is done then we will take the other UV islands that we have and we will fit them within the Dead Space that will remain above our main UV Island and the last thing that we'll seek to improve on this particular head of course is that we will want to reclaim a little bit of the space here that is the Dead Space within the inside of the mouth and we will also want to close the eyes as well as we are doing that we will evaluate what it actually looks like in 3D to make sure that first of all we're getting the straightest possible edges here or I suppose these are just arbitrary lined within the textures but we'll try to straighten these as much as we possibly can once we're relatively happy with the work that we have done then we will do a mirror on top of our UVS so that the final UVS that we have are perfectly symmetrical or at least as symmetrical as they possibly can be let's go to town on this there's a few different ways we could actually deal with the fact that we want the mask of the face to be a little bit bigger either we uh already fit neatly the corners of our UV Islands within the corners of our texture sheet either we do that and then we slowly scale up the mask of the face and deal with the stretching that it's going to create here or alternatively I could actually scale this up right now until I get to the size that I want it to be and then I could squish in the corners of the textures doesn't really matter which one did we do but uh I actually kind of feel better here about manually scaling this up uh first so I guess I kind of want these UVS to be as big as this I mean the mask of the face will always take only a fraction of the texture of course we have to accept that but I think in this particular case this should be pretty good here in fact if I was to move this again within the lower left Corners to kind of imagine how much texture space is taking here so we're taking a little bit more than half of the zero to one space on the x-axis and perhaps a little bit less than that on the y-axis but that will always kind of be the case so I believe so I think this is good enough so let's move this until it is about here so I definitely want to keep enough Dead Space on the top to be able to fit in the other UV islands that we have and I don't know yet how big these will have to be in fact actually we could guess that right away to make sure that we already have enough space in here so let me actually just um perhaps take the mouth bag and add one or two more seams in here so we'll already kind of guess the amount of space that we need for all of this doesn't matter that much where you put your seams your extra seams on top of this because by and large it is inside the mouth of course so it doesn't matter that much I suppose but let me turn on my viewport overlays of course so that I can actually see through the model in this particular case and I can see where the edges are okay so we have our seams that are here we can see where they currently are I suppose the easiest thing I could probably do for this mouth bag would be to take the edge that runs down the center of the mouth bag so this Edge right here and perhaps do a split on top of this but not on the portion of the edge Loop that is on the back here I think we want to keep that merged so actually let me select this Edge right here let's see this one here supposed to zoom in within the mouth bag maybe this would be a little bit easier to understand what is going on in fact here we go okay so from this particular edge here let me do a shortest path selection to the back of the mouth bag so this one here press u m Mark that as a seam let's do the same thing on the other side and this edge here all the way to the corner of the mouth there also Mark that as a seam so that should be a a lot better take this particular UV Island now let's uh reunrap it and so that already looks a lot better I want to get rid of all the stretching that I possibly can on all of these uh UV Islands so that we can kind of try to pack them already okay so for the ears it would definitely be simpler actually to turn on UV sync selection back on it just makes it easier to uh add our seams of course so let me turn on my viewport overlay here yet again where should we add our seams around here we have to deal with the fact that the outside here the Helix of the ear you can see how we're definitely getting uh some much lower taxes in this particular zone so we definitely have to deal with that somehow one thing we could do is just detach the back of the ear so actually split our ears in two it wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea in fact as far as if I was just like this particular edge here do a shortest path selection that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing I think what I'm doing here is what I'm doing right now isn't necessarily the and I'll be all of uh seems uh for the ear there there's a whole host of ways that you could actually do that but I think this would actually get us uh much further along in fact one thing I could do is perhaps uh deselect some of these edges here so keep some of these here welded I don't think I need to completely separate the back of the ear and so let's see what we're actually getting here okay that's that's awkward this is probably because of the UV sync selection here once again so now let's turn UV sync selection off let's reselect everything within our 3D viewport and press L here select only the UV Island for the ear scale this down here a little bit you can see because of this particular Checker that we currently have this is why I really prefer this particular Checker than the other Checkers that comes with text tools because this one actually allows us to very clearly see what is the orientation and if we have something that is mirrored let's say we can actually easily see it here so here I could actually just scale down here yet again until we flip this and now you can see in our 3D viewport that these have now the proper orientation they are not flipped anymore so that's a lot better this is a quite consistent perhaps the only place that we could improve this take a look around the ears you can see that our Helix here is a lot more balanced in terms of textual density with the rest of the ear so that's really wonderful it's becoming a little bit denser here uh perhaps towards the inside of the ear here I'm not sure that I necessarily mind that but I don't want to create those uh any kind of zigzagging or staircasing you know I could uh add a cut here then add a cut like this within our UVS but it would kind of give us this kind of weird kind of zigzag kind of staircased uh seam that I'm not sure that I really really like here I think I'm completely fine with these ears like this there's a little bit of imbalance in terms of taxal density but it's nothing that would actually create a problem later on I think and of course as much as possible we kind of want to minimize the amount of seams that I have around the ear so to be told I think I'm actually quite fine with this yeah I'm pretty fine with this okay let's actually uh do the same on the other side and finally the other UV islands that we haven't addressed are the eye bags so there too Perhaps it is worth to add a few seams on there let's actually take a look here to see how how it is stretching unless our character somehow loses an eye trupito probably won't really see these polygons ever when we're doing root apology we were talking about the fact that we they're there really just as a safety measure in case that somehow we have a little bit of a gap between our eyeballs and our eyelids which really shouldn't happen but may actually happen and also to keep the mesh completely watertight so those are two reasons why where could we actually add our seams then let's turn UV sync selection back on this here I think I definitely need to split these UVS here perhaps even select the edge here on the inside you can see that we actually we do not have one nice Edge Loop that goes from the corner of the eye all the way to the back perhaps we could actually add uh one of these exact seams here it really doesn't matter since uh as we said the inside of the eye bag it's a very low priority for us okay so let's just add our seams here and uh see what this actually looks like afterward yeah see this is nice and uniform so sure the seam here isn't necessarily the prettiest but it is totally acceptable in this particular context all right let me just do the same on the other side and there we go we can turn UV sync selection back on and I believe that's all the themes that we need to add you can see that all my UV Islands now all have very different sizes of course so of course let's just select everything that we have within our UV window let's go to UV let's do a average Islands scale on top of this just to make our life easier here why don't we also do a pack UVS at the same time and while I am doing that let me actually turn off the rotate here cool okay so this gives us a pretty good idea of the kind of negative space that we'll need to fit all of these UV Islands in there the biggest UV Island after the face is uh the mouth bag of course it's definitely not necessary for the mouth bag to take as much space as as it is currently taking because this is the inside of the mouth so we could definitely scale this down just to make sure that it is a little bit more optimized there so let me just scale this down here a little bit and also just do a 90 degree rotation on this one thing that we do want to pay attention to at this particular stage okay is uh as much as possible we want all these UV Islands to all be oriented in the same way as much as possible if you look at the Checker that we currently have you can kind of read the text in the same direction you can see that the ears are slightly rotated a little bit but the text is still kind of in the same orientation as what we have for the rest of the face there so but we don't want to have in this particular stage is something that's kind of like this here to have one ear that's kind of rotated kind of weirdly like this with a different orientation than the rest of the face for organic models it's not the end of the world but for other models this could actually be a big problem the reason why you want as much as possible for all your UV Islands to all be oriented the same way is because it's very common to tile detail Maps over the surface of a model and to perhaps apply that detail map only on certain zones of the model using a mask let's say but so let's say that you imagine that this was uh I don't know this was a shirt for some reason the orientation of the UVS will actually dictate the orientation of the grain of the detail map that you are applying on the surface afterward in the context of a shirt it probably would be fine for some of these UV Islands to be rotated if I think of let's say the sleeves but the point being that the orientation of the UV Islands will dictate the orientation of the grain for any detail map that could be tiling over the surface of an object and so it is good to think about that when we are orienting these particular UV shells of course we can also do something like use a second UV set here if we wanted to tile detail maps and certainly in the context of games that is very common to do that to tile detail Maps using a second UV set where the first UV set you don't really care about the orientation of the shells and then the second UV set that's where you really care about that problem with having a second UV set is is that it is very memory intensive if you're doing a profile piece it probably doesn't really matter if you are working on a production that would perhaps be something that could be a problem maybe you do not want to necessarily have to pay the memory price of having a second UV set anyway that gets a little bit technical but the point being that if we can't afford to ever have to add a second UV set for any reason then it is preferable to avoid having to do so but in the context of a face well let's say that we are tiling I don't know skin pores within an engine after the fact and we'll kind of have the same problem if we have skin pores and some of these shells have an orientation that is very different than the other shells that we have through the head then the skin pores here would kind of perhaps look like they're rotated at 90 degrees right so you kind of want to think about that a little bit so as much as possible I really would like for these UV shells to be oriented in a orientation that is very consistent with what is happening on the face so for this ear that would be about like this and for this year then that would be perhaps about like this year or so of course we will symmetry is these later on we will actually do that for now we're just doing this as a bit of a preview so to speak and I suppose for the eye bags you could also rotate these here a little bit using the same kind of logic this would have to be like this here and this one would have to be like so okay so this is the best case scenario fortunately the ears they kind of always fit a little bit better if they are rotated at 90 degrees so that's going to be kind of interesting to try and fit that in there and everything right now has the same relative scale as we have said though other than for the mouth bag of course and the eye bags too we could actually scale these down a little bit but for now they're small enough that we can just put these on the side there so can we already kind of fit this here like if I was to pack these UVS within an imaginary zero to one space how much Dead Space over the top of our main island would I need to fit these UVS in there this is the back of the ear here I think I really like the idea of splitting off the back of the ear because maybe I can rotate the back of the ears at 90 degrees I think that would allow me to pack these UVS in a little bit tighter there I think I actually feel kind of fine about that to split off the back of the ear then let me hold Ctrl and do a right click and drag to do a lasso selection for all of these polygons here on the back of the ear and then either I could do alt M on my keyboard to do a split and then press y afterward or click on selection here to split these polygons off and then press G to move these independently or I suppose if you want to be fancy another thing you could do is to Simply disable your sticky selection mode do your lasso here yet again on these polygons and then simply press G to move these and then to reselect share location from your sticky selection mode those two ways will allow you to split off here the back of the ear let's do the same thing on the other side okay so yeah what I kind of have in mind is uh let me just move these here out of the way is that maybe I could actually kind of Squish in the ear like this perhaps rotate it here a little bit something kind of like that and then do that on both sides here that would actually allow me to fit both ears here very nicely into the corners and for the back of the ear here I suppose I could probably fit them like this here I know I've just said that it might not be desirable to have some of these UV shells at 90 degrees but considering the fact that this is the back of the year I can't really see any problems that this would actually create the mouth back here could actually scale it down a little bit perhaps kind of Squish it in here like this on the side and then take our eye bags and then kind of tuck them in sort of like this I think this would be nice and optimized so because I'm kind of already more or less packing these in it's just a way for me to kind of visualize how much space will I actually need for these UVS in the end and how much dead space should I keep over the main UV Island so that I can really optimize and use as much of the textured space as possible for the main UV Island all right so we kind of expect now that we're scaling everything up I'll need to keep us about as much space as this here near the top of my UVS to fit these in here all right cool so that gives me a pretty good estimate of the amount of that space that I need to keep and I think I'm satisfied though so let me just move these out of the way for now we'll deal with these later but so I need to keep about as much dead space as this here right now so cool okay so my strategy here will be to scale up this main island here a little bit more until the mask of the face occupies as much space as I wanted to occupy so about like this here or so then let me move this down here a little bit that it's kind of nicely centered on our texture sheet and then we will simply squish in all of these UVS here we'll see we'll we'll have to compress EVS here by quite a lot to be able to fit in the back of the skull within the that zero to one space in fact maybe I'm a little bit too ambitious right now let me scale them down I think this should be good enough it's going to be a very nice challenge let me see if I can actually uh have my UVS be a little bit uh transparent there so that I can see where my zero to one space is here so to our viewport overlays and I suppose I have to turn off stretch here if I want to be able to see where is the border here of my zero to one space yeah that that seems pretty good to me so our challenge then is to squish in the back of the skull the base of the neck squish all of that in within that nice zero to one space and at the same time remove the stretching that we have on the lips on the nose make sure that we are getting as much uniformity within the mask of the face as we possibly can let's start with the changes that we need to do to the cranium and the neck let's smush all of these in before we do any kind of work on the mask of the face on the nose on the lips there because the Contour of the face is probably the one that feels a little bit riskier there we have to move these polygons quite far in and I'm quite confident that the work that we will do on the mask of the face will go quite well here so let's actually start by smushing in the cranium and the neck within our zero to one space we could start with these uh grab brushes and stuff but actually perhaps one thing I would actually rather do here instead is perhaps just to do a general scale we're going to move our 3D cursor to the inside border of our selection so I'm holding down shift and I'm doing a right click to move our 3D cursor so about here or so and then from our drop down menu here we will select uh well I suppose it's a 2d cursor in this particular gate uh case here so let's select 2D cursor right here press s press uh to do a scale like this and let's just smush all this in here let's do the same thing on the other side we can take a look at the feedback here in the 3D viewport you can see that these polygons are all becoming quite rectangular but we will address that I mean in the end they will always be slightly rectangular because we are smooshing them in as we have just said there so we are compressing them a little bit but it's a good trade-off to get more resolution on the face so I'm actually quite happy about that now let's do the same thing with uh the vertices here that are on the bottom let's press wire in this particular case let's constrain this on the y-axis so path like this should be should be pretty good and now let's switch over to our grab brush the fact that the ears have been detached does help quite a lot because we don't have to deal with the ear here and making sure that the ear has a good enough resolution there so it actually helps us to do a better job with this and I suppose we could actually compress these down a little bit so that we get a ratio that's a little bit more Square on these UVs all right we can now bring in our straightening tools so let me take all of these vertices that are here let's go within our text tools and let's do a align here so that we are aligning and uh aligning here towards the bottom I want to keep a very slight Gap just to avoid having any kind of uh weird issues where uh perhaps some some of these polygons could start to sample the texture that's on the top of the head if the texture is repeating or something like that let's do the same thing here let's do an alignment like so perhaps here I can actually move them very slightly towards the Border without touching the border of our zero to one space and let's do the same thing on this side so now we could break out the relaxed brush but what I would actually rather do is to uh do some partial unwrapping and what I mean by that is that we're just going to go ahead and select a bunch of vertices here let's let's take let's say all all of these vertices here and then let's press U twice to do an unwrap on this and this will probably give us a better distribution for these vertices than if we were to just use a relaxed brush on all of these polygons so that was for the back of the neck here we can see the kind of result that we're getting and see how the UVS here are quite rectangular they're quite stretched and it does help to make them just a little bit more Square in the process so let's do the same on the other side let's take all these in fact we could actually take all of that here we just don't want to take the mask of the face but we actually kind of want to take everything else in a way so I'm actually going to more or less select all the vertices here we could even try to select the verses that are on the border now sometimes it's a little bit risky but we could give it a try see the kind of result that we're going to get out of this all right that looks pretty good to me I'm concerned about the vertices on this border but we'll see what happens once we unwrap this again yeah see I don't like that okay so that's pretty bad uh so let's actually deselect these I'm holding down control and shift when doing this lasso selection so pulling down Ctrl shift and then doing a right click and drag to create a lasso that will deselect vertices it's kind of what I was talking about when I was talking about fighting the tools you can see the kind of result that we had there when we did an unwrap and we had some of those border vertices selected okay so yeah that's quite a lot better now now you can see how some of these uh vertices here on the seam that's on the back of the face see the kind of result that we're sort of getting here these vertices are all sort of going a little bit diagonally down there so that's really not great so what we can actually do for that is do a selection on all the vertices that are on the border and on these now we will do an unwrap it we will do an unwrap that will be constrained on the y-axis or I suppose on the v-axis since these are UVS So within our text tools here where it says unwrap we can actually do an unwrap but that is constrained on the v-axis see the result that we are getting from that we have a better distribution now for all of these vertices but it has not destroyed that nice alignment that we have done we can do the same thing here with these vertices that are on the bottom uh in fact let me take all these vertices and straighten them yet again I can see that some of these vertices are not quite aligned with each other so we can do the same with these vertices here that are on the bottom in fact let me just do a a bigger box selection select more vertices here and then let's do an unwrap on the status constraint on the u-axis there you go slightly better distribution of UVs we could try actually a little bit of relaxation here on these UVs let's try to relax brush see where we are here so we're in about this region here while I do that in fact let me also turn on the lock borders here I don't want to move those here so a little bit of relaxation like that it's possible because I'm using um a mouse right now that this relaxed brush is perhaps a little bit too strong to begin with let me actually reduce a little bit it's strength there we'll have to relax for longer but it's going to give us a little bit more control so I I think that's totally fine could also do it here a little bit do it here a little bit we are on laplacian which does deal better with the borders as we have talked about before so I think uh I think it should work pretty well let's take a look around see these are relatively Square I'm quite happy with those there's a little bit of a so these ue's these lines that we have on the textures still would want them to be as straight as I possibly can so this is probably one of those moments where we uh we really just want to start to really uh take the grab brush and perhaps be a little bit more localized perhaps where we do a little bit of grab and a little bit of Shifting around here of these these UVS manually it's very slowly I guess I want to hit this Zone here I'm looking at the other 3D window while I'm doing this and I'm just trying to perhaps pull these down a little bit so that these lines here if I do a control Z here you can see I'm just uh see this line here it's kind of a little bit wobbly there creates a very extremely shallow s but a little bit of grab brush you can see how now it's a little bit straighter so that's pretty good I know that these edges probably should be relatively straight in my UVS because they are relatively straight in my 3D window so I could actually if I do a little bit of relaxation here oh yeah see that's that's actually better just trying to straight out some of these edges here I could actually really want these to nicely Follow The Edge Loops as much as possible it's back at the neck it doesn't matter that much but why not right uh we might as well try to do the best job that we can so all of these edges that are kind of traveling slightly diagonally down I actually want to straighten them as much as possible really so let's let's take our grab brush here let's turn off lock borders and just take these and perhaps move them up you can see my fall off right now it probably isn't great on the grab brush I want a sharper profile which will uh probably move these vertices uh yeah anyway that's uh press a little bit more interesting as I move these up you can see that it's kind of doing a better job at straightening out the edges by having these edges straight in the texture sheet it means that the Checker will more nicely follow the same orientation as the edge Loops we don't have to go crazy on this but I think it's going to help a little bit to get a slightly better quality texture going on afterwards if I turn off my viewport overlays yeah see pretty happy with the texture here it's completely fine if some of these uh if the Checker goes slightly diagonally across the neck it's totally fine don't go too crazy with that okay this is very very good all right so these polygons are pretty Square on the neck they're pretty Square well here they're pretty rectangular in fact but that's okay it's the cranium we don't really care I mean this character is going to have hair in the end so we're not really going to see that first of all second of all even the character he did not have hair you know if we were to actually sculpt some skin forced air hair follicles or something in order to bake them out they still would come out looking uh quite nice if you sculpt all your details and you baked them out afterward you can deal with a lot more stretching within your UVS and of course few something like substance painter and you project details then that's actually the same thing a little bit of stretching within the UVS can be very well managed because uh we are projecting details and so the stretching of the UVS gets factored in but if we are simply tiling details let's say only using detail Maps let's say in the engine in the end and that's where perhaps uh it's a little bit more critical to ensure that all of these polygons wind up being uh of a consistent size and removing as much as possible the stretching I'm still not sure how we'll do the tertiary details for this particular face it will be the next step after this particular class at a minimum we'll do certainly a series of projections cool okay so this is looking pretty good for the neck I think you said this side of the face here there's a little bit of stretching in there but we don't care about that because we will mirror that over so we don't really care this is the side of the face that actually matters it's looking really good overall very happy with this the only thing here is that if we struggle to fit it to to fit in the ear then that will make it interesting to perhaps take the grab brush and try to smush this in here a little bit more just so that we can actually afford to have more space for the years that that might actually happen in fact why don't I do that here right away a little bit of relaxation here using a laplacian I think it should be pretty good pretty happy with that around the border the years is there anything we can do there you can see how our Checkers kind of starting to cave in here a little bit so perhaps we can do a little bit of work there uh I think we just need to move this here a little bit so I'm doing the move in the UV window but I am actually looking at the feedback within the 3D viewport as I'm doing that try and get these lines to be as straight as I can we could try a little bit of uh unwrap on this after the fact so let's do a box selection around these vertices let's do unwrap on this yeah it does remove some of that stretching you can see there's still a little bit of a dip here so I just want to move these uh I think a little bit further down I'm taking this to a degree that is slightly pedantic okay but I would rather do that and be a little bit too uh clean so to speak than to be a little bit too dirty as we uh produce a class on us okay yeah we can start to attack the mask of the face let's actually do a little bit of work around the eyes and uh the mouth I think yeah it's time we actually did something about those this might be the first time ever that I actually use a Wacom tablet while doing UVs okay so what we want to do for the eyes and the mouth is uh really just close them let's start with the eyes it's probably going to be the easier one here to deal with so I'm just going to use this brush here now if you could do a proportional editing to close the eyes to a whole bunch of ways that you could actually do this of course uh you don't need to have a Macomb you could just manually move some of these vertices uh that would be completely fine too take us to add a sharper profile on this dough this is kind of weird uh considering type that I'm using my withcom let's switch over here to smoother I think it's going to be better yeah unfortunately I don't think there's a way I can mask the bottom vertices unless there's a way here that I can uh constrained the grab brush to only the selected vertices that would be extremely useful for us but I don't believe that there is a way to do that I think that would definitely be a very nice thing to add in the future some way to create masking just to have a mask brush in here somewhere that would be really really cool so that I could actually mask the lower eyelid while I move the upper eyelid vertices around because we could do that if we're using the proportional editing because we could uh enable that here let's say we go to grab here and press G to move this our proportional editing is way too big could be because this value is just incredibly High not sure why this value is as big as it is right now if I would if this was let's say 0.1 what would this look like yeah okay so oh yeah this is still way too big okay uh so let's do this again let's press G as he was actually going on let's actually switch this here to be uh at the median Point here instead so this is the reason why this is not working the way that we want it to work here so let's press G and then let's play around here with the the radius of this here so let's say I was to move this vertex here then we could actually turn on this little connected button that is right here so that uh this would actually only move the vertices that are directly attached okay so let's play around here with our fall off here uh let's try I don't know maybe a smoother fall off on this let's play around here with the size of this have a little bit bigger let's see how a different profile would work that's not too bad actually so that's fear I think it's actually pretty good let's go ahead here and just re reduce the proportional size yeah I like that really really nice I actually quite like that uh our Lids here will become a little bit further apart here that will kind of create a little bit more of a round corner here than being completely compressed uh together because it will simply give a little bit more UV space to these polygons that are around the Border here you know if we were to compress all these vertices like this you can see that now this uh this will definitely give us UV or triangulation problems depending on in which direction is the triangulation going I think too that it's probably not a good thing that I have a curve going on like this so I I want to straighten this as much as I can really so let's actually do that those sculpting brushes are actually quite nice so I could maybe do something kind of like this here and even in fact if we kind of follow the natural angles that we have on the eye here if I look at the lower eyelid from this particular angle like that it's completely fine if there's a slight dip like that that is kind of happening so if I kind of dip the UVS here down a little bit it just makes it a little bit more consistent with what is happening in the 3D window I won't have a fair amount of resolution to the Chronicles because if you look at the 3D volumes that we have here there's actually quite a lot of variation in the volumes can be very easy to have a bit of a pixelated mess there especially if you kind of imagine that you I don't know somehow have a close-up on the eyes of the character which happens quite a lot within video games and you definitely want to have enough UVS for the Chronicles so that they look nice and sharp so perhaps this is even a Zone where we kind of want to use our magnify here so I'm going to select the pinch brush but I'm going to hold Ctrl and uh yeah so okay let's just lower the strength of this brush way down I don't mind losing a little bit of the space around the circumference of the eye if it means that I'm gaining a little bit more space for the eye I think that's a pretty good trade-off so we can make the Chronicles here a lot bigger could still probably get some eyelids that are a little bit more straight than this ideally what we want is for these uh lines that we have to Simply travel very nicely uniformly across the eyelid that's how we can really get uh the best possible UVS in this particular case it's going to remove as much as possible of that distortion why not use a straighten tool then right let's go within our text tools let's do a a line here towards the top let's get rid of this one just like that and then let's do the same thing with these here and let's do something this one here and then why not take all of these yet again and let's do an unwrap what I just did here I kind of want to do it on the bottom Edge as well all right let's break out uh our relax brush let's get a AK Checker map on this even then maybe we could get something that's even a little bit smaller than this why not okay within our material parameters then let's go within base color right here and where it says vector here let's load in here a vector math where it says add right here let's go ahead and select a multiplication multiply right here the vector1 here it will be the UE map and our Vector 2 here let's set this to I don't know let's say uh I don't know let's go crazy here let's go like 10 and 10. yeah okay maybe that's too small but yeah so we actually want to have a little bit of a compression here built into the UVS when the eye is open so that when the eye closes that will have a very nice square shape when I do a relax here you can see it's actually helping in this particular case so we've made the Chronicles much uh bigger so that we can have a lot sharper details on that particular Zone and you sort of expect the player camera at some point to get really close to this and to really see the shape of The Chronicles you kind of expect to have these uh very nice close-ups in modern video games so we want to make sure that uh at whichever resolution our textures are that this will hold up quite nicely but of course we want to kind of diffuse a little bit more the Distortion that we'll be building around the particular Chronicle there let's actually just get a our AK texture back so let's just put the multiplication values here back to one I might be getting a little bit too ambitious with the size of these Chronicles and uh I've built in so much stretching within the UVS that I think I should probably try to do an overall relax on the whole Contour of the eye actually yeah that's actually a pretty good idea because I actually don't mind having a little bit more dead space here with ndis there just only very so slightly if it actually kind of rounds out the corner here a little bit which I kind of like because I think that we should indeed uh relax these here a little bit yeah something like this I think this is pretty good just a little bit of relaxation on this I think it's a pretty good idea I mean we've been moving things left and right manually so of course at some point we're about to build in there a little bit of uh Distortion you know kind of like how this line kind of nicely follows the eye as you can see and it kind of turns with the curuncles in fact if we can get it to follow even more nicely the Chronicles I think it's going to be pretty cool so Indiana we've lost a little bit of the resolution that we had added for the Chronicles but because we made them so much bigger at the beginning will have retained a lot more of the bigger shape than had we never built that into the first place but if else if we need to uh kind of get rid of what is happening here I don't really like the the shapes that we have there maybe I just have to move this manually a little bit try to get some straighter lines there see that's a lot better okay let's do a little bit of work around uh the mask of the face around the outside corner of the eye here let's do a little bit of relaxation on there and let's see if we can get some straighter lines going on within this uh texture that we have here I'm just using a combination of crab and relax to try and get some of these lines to be as straight as I can while also trying to minimize the amount of distortion that is kind of built in these two things are sometimes uh not compatible trying to make lines Trader but also remove the Distortion sometimes they kind of ask you to go into different directions there so you kind of have to find something that's a little bit in between the lower lid doesn't close really all that much when a character closes their eyes there so it's not really a lid that moves all that much like the upper lid does so we don't really need to try and build in there a little bit of rectangularness if you will within those texels in that particular spot we can keep them very nice and square and the outside Critter ndi is definitely a Zone where we want to spend quite a lot of time to really remove as much of this Distortion as we can because we are forcing in there a little bit uh for the eyes to be closed within the UVS of course but right now a character has their eye open so of course the geometry the 3D geometry doesn't quite match what we are building with the UVS here so we really want to be careful here and practically move every vertex one at a time to try to really minimize as much as possible all of this all of the Distortion that is within this particular Zone you can see I have a bit of a downward curve here onto brow bone if you look at the texture so we want to try to pull on these UVS to try and get those lines to read as straight as they possibly can so I'm pulling into 2D window but I am looking at the feedback in the 3D view to see in which direction I should be pulling my UVS to try and get these straightest possible lines and always after doing a move like this you want to go back on top with the relaxed brush and just do a very slight amount of relaxation or you could also try unwrapping see those are starting to look a lot straighter there so that's pretty cool overall this is uh I think this is working really really well all right let's take care of the nose next because the nose won't be that complicated and we'll finish the mask of the face by tackling the mouth here first thing I want to do here is just do a really big box selection around all the vertices here I'm going to try not to touch the nostrils for now but at least for all the vertices that are over the ball of the nose here and let's just try to do an unwrap on this to see the kind of result that we get from that yeah you can see that this is pretty much the optimal unwrap that we're gonna get so I don't think that unwrapping is really going to help us here I believe relax will probably give us a much better result though because what relax will do is that it will simply spread out all of the compression that is happening here over a bigger zone so we're gonna get something that's more uniform in terms of uh vertex distribution let's give that a try as I do this here you can see how we are pulling some of these vertices up and we are getting something that is a lot more consistent in terms of uh UV size here look at the nose in the 3D viewport this is already a huge upgrade if I do too much of this relaxation though you can see that some of these moles are starting to stretch quite a lot so we are even though we are relaxing we are actually adding Distortion if we kind of look at these lines so we want to be aware of that you don't want to relax everything all of the time you really have to pay attention to what it's actually doing I feel like the nostrils here the corner of the nostrils may be a little bit tricky but I mean at the same time we're really not far from where we want to be in this particular zone so perhaps just wanted to unwrap in this particular zone is going to be enough to get us a very nice and clean result just doing a localized unwrap like this really really helps to uh remove some of the Distortion that D relax has been building in so I probably want to do an unwrap here too although I want to be wary that if I do an unwrap over a Zone that's a little bit too big you'll see that I'll start to wind up with a result that's going to start to compress here yet again so yeah sometimes on certain vertices it works great on outer vertices it does the opposite of what we actually wanted to do I wonder if there's a way to bring even more resolution to the tip of the nose perhaps by smushing some of these vertices around let's say the vertices that are under your nose there they probably don't matter nearly as much as the ones that are on the tip of the nose so perhaps there's actually a way for me to gain a little bit of that space for the tip of the nose see just like that and I'm pointing up having lines that are nice and straight within the 3D viewport so that's quite nice too now vertically though the vertical lines um they will always give us something that's rectangular because uh we have to accommodate for the size of the nose of course so there's really nothing we can really do about that and it's completely fine if there starts to be a quite a lot of compression within the nostrils themselves we won't really want to texture the inside there it'll probably wind up being some type of solid color in the end so we don't have to worry about that too much you can also see some of the triangles of Dolores we kind of look at the notes from this particular angle here like this is a triangle that's kind of creating uh this kind of ugliness there somebody's vertices may actually need to be moved a little bit in fact yeah actually some of that is within the mesh directly all right so this is looking better from a modeling standpoint I have a little bit of wildliness here that I would like to get rid of so let's see if a little bit of relaxation is going to do that for us and I could also try a localized unwrap on this else I might have to just tweak some of these vertices say so something kind of like that I think this is as good as we're going to get the tip of the nose bear in mind her face is asymmetric and her nose is especially asymmetric when I look here within the UV editor you can see that the symmetry line is nice and straight so all of this uh kind of stretching to the side there is a result of her nose being asymmetric as far as the 3D model is concerned once we've symmetrize the face we'll do a very slight relaxation or perhaps a very slight unwrapping of the tip of the nose there to see if we can get these to be slightly straighter just just a little bit which means that India and our UVS will be slightly asymmetric but that's okay considering the fact that her face is asymmetric all this little wobbliness is there just a little unwrap on top of this is all that we need to get something here that looks much nicer so yeah that's looking pretty good to me I love how these lines are continuing straight across the face to the other side the nose will always have a little bit less resolution than elsewhere we are fitting this 3D Volume onto a 2d surface within a constrained location so I mean that will always happen but at least in this case I think we were able to get the nose slightly under control and get a better distribution of UVS than what we had before I'm quite happy about this let's move on to the mouth well think about the mouth is that I said that I wanted to close the mouth which is true but at the same time I also want to pay attention to what this character would actually look like if this character was to open her mouth all the polygons that we have created here on the corner of the mouth all of these would actually have to stretch all the polygons here would all become nice and round if she was to open her mouth so it's quite normal like we have done for the eyes there to be some amount of compression built into the UVS when her mouth is closed so that when the mouth opens these UVS become nice and straight so in a way also within our UVS it's actually quite normal for her to do a little bit of an O like that with her mouth a little bit not as much as she is doing here and certainly the bigger issues have to do with the upper lip and the lower lip having such an angle in there we really want to reduce that but for the corners of the mouth it's actually quite normal for it to be nice and rounded like this so we kind of have to try to close the top lip and the bottom lip but also try not to disturb too much what is happening on the corner of the mouth right there okay so we know what we're looking for so let's go to town in this I think there are two actually perhaps uh using proportional editing as opposed to the grab brush would be the better idea once again because of the fact that we cannot mask I can't just come here with a grab brush and take the top lip and just move it down although well Jupiter is not too bad but you can see that when I try to close the lower lip afterwards then we are actually also hitting the top lip with the brush yeah so that's why it would be really nice to have some type of masking on the grab brush but uh sadly we do not have that but actually what I've done here I'm actually going to keep it because uh this looks uh better already within the 3D viewport a little bit of relax here let's see the kind of result that we're getting from that ideally as much as possible we really want this kind of Checker to really continue nicely across so we don't really want to have a bit of a dip like that it's not really nice so I'm not sure that relaxation is going to give us the kind of result that we want but let's try and unwrap again of this uh these particular polygons uh or of these particular UVs I will pay the price for the fact that we have continued uh the UVS within one Edge loop on the inside I will definitely pay the price for that because we have to fit that particular extra poly within our UVs it's going to reduce slightly the amount of UV space that I have for the outside of the lips so hopefully that's not a mistake but we'll see how it goes if it really becomes a problem perhaps we will detach that inside poly Loop and perhaps you will include that within the UVS of the mouthpack we'll see how it goes but I feel as if we are already quite close you know like looking at this within the 3D viewport right now I don't feel as if there's actually that much that needs to change we want to of course densify a little bit the text host that we have on the lower lip here and perhaps even on the top lip a little bit but truth be told they're already quite close to what I expect them to be so I think it's already uh we are already falling into more of a Polish uh stage I think with these then with any kind of really heavy kind of work I said that the eyes would be a little bit easier than the mouth but I'm actually starting to think that uh uh the mouth will be a lot easier than the eyes there because we had to work quite a lot to get the UVS of the eyes to look like these and they look quite good to you by the way I'm very very proud about these these might be the best UVS I've Done For Eyes so far yeah so I think what I want to do with the mouth is kind of the same thing as we have done with the eyes like let's start by just closing off the negative space that we have here and perhaps to take all of these UVS that we have here and maybe let's uh straighten them as a pretty good starting point here so let's go ahead and do that let's do a straighten here towards the bottom so it's going to straighten based upon the lowest of vertex that is currently selected let's do the same thing with the lower lip so these are the vertices that are creating the border of the lip here where the lips actually meet so I think those two I actually want to straighten those out we might have to manually build the corner here of the mouth I'm kind of tempted to do that in fact perhaps unwrapping would give us something nice here but I kind of have my doubts yeah no see that does not work what about this here that's even worse okay yeah there's really nothing we can do here we have to manually build this particular Zone oh actually one more thing I want to do let me take all of these UVS that we have straightened and let's do Ace trading on you or rather in unwrap under you in this particular case and yeah that's pretty good okay yeah so let's just build this here manually really it wouldn't be a bad idea to also pay attention to which is the loop that uh goes directly in the middle of the top lip and the lower lip let me see if we can actually just grab it here very quickly so which one is it this one here makes it kind of hard right to see what is happening actually let's turn on sync selection we can actually see which is that Loop so here we go it's this particular Loop that is right here it's not a bad idea to perhaps do a little bit of work with UV sync selection that is turned on in this particular case it would actually allow me to see better where's the wireframe and the loops that I am selecting so yeah I haven't really been going back and forth between UV sync selection on or off but it's not a bad idea to turn it on back once in a while so that I can actually see where are the vertices here that I want to click on within the 3D window it's not a bad idea to do that but I really wish that those two modes would be combined I kind of hate the fact that using selection is even a thing um to be honest I mean I would usually rather want to work with you these things selections that is turned on but all of the other unwrapping tools would have to work in this particular workflow you can see that our UV layout here most of these tools do not actually work when we have UV sync selection that is turned on well that's really terrible and yeah you can see that our unwrap definitely does not work either with UVC selection that is turned on we have a much better display within the viewport but unfortunately we uh lose a lot of those nice tools so yeah it kind of sucks this is definitely one of the weaknesses of blender's uh UV editing which does really suck because trippy told I actually think that in general that blenders UV editor is actually quite good like we have a lot of very nice things in here I like this particular stretch map that is here a lot of these uh tools that we have because text tools are actually quite nice the unwrapping algorithm feels pretty good so there's really a lot to like about unwrapping with blender but it's not perfect I think Maya is probably the software that gives me the most Flawless unwrapping experience but I also want to say that I think that blender actually comes uh as a nice second there and it's definitely good enough you know for free software it is absolutely amazing you can absolutely do professional work with uh Planters UV unwrapping but at the same time I wouldn't tell someone to go and buy a Maya just for the unwrapper you know unless they have money to spare foreign I've made a pretty good point when we were modeling this to try and keep all of these edges to always be nicely spaced out as much as possible so I feel actually quite confident that if I do the same thing here within the UV editor that we're going to wind up having a very high quality unwrap in the end what would our relaxed tools give us yeah that's not bad actually kind of like this a little bit of relax here I think is actually quite nice we can get those edges to have a very nice and uniform curve and so I actually quite like that they look in 3D that looks really good to me we have to accept that there will be a slight amount of staircase thing like this of course we always want to reduce it as much as we can but considering the fact that we are kind of forcing the UVS here in a particular configuration that is very different than what we have in 3D we also have to accept that there will be a slight amount of staircasing happening but the idea is that when the character opens her mouth that that staircasing probably will uh disappear quite a lot cases that I can't actually see where these vertices are you know like I would like to actually pinpoint some of these vertices exactly and the only way we can actually kind of do that is by turning UV sync selection back on and now turning our overlays here back on and Beyond Okay so which uh which is the vertex say I want to select this particular vertex that is here you know so let's actually select it we can see in 3d where that is it's actually further on the outside than I actually thought so it's good that I have selected it I don't have to worry let's turn your vsync selection back off Let's uh reselect it here one thing I could do here actually is um could actually take this vertex here move it down so that it's we get a nicer curve here because of course even if I get very nice consistent Curves in my unwrapping window I don't have the same Curves in 3D I'm obviously going to wind up having a little bit of staircasing but it's only worth to worry about that so much you know at some point that's just the nature of an organic 3D model now I want to say once again it's not necessary for most 3D models that you'll make to go to this level of detail if you're kind of watching this and kind of thinking that oh my God I need to do this all of the time through all the 3D models and unwrapping is so complicated and oh my God like I can't believe that people do this all of the time well people don't usually do this all of the time uh this is really just because this is a face but even then you know you kind of want to think about like in which context will this space be used you know in the context of a class I want to be extremely clean here with the UVS that I'm creating but in a lot of other contexts I would probably just uh do a quick unwrap and look at the result and if the result looks nice and stretchless probably keep that you know if you're going to make your own topology that you will afterward use across a lot of different faces a lot of different projects then as we have said it's not a waste of time to spend this time to make some really nice UVS if you are if you are going to reuse what you have done here across many different projects but yeah I will accept that this Zone here is going to look a little bit mushed there's nothing we can really do about that and if we just divide the space also a lot of this staircasing would actually disappear because we would simply have more polygons I need to do a little bit of relax on this oh yeah that's nice for the top lip we have some more work to do of course let's try and unwrap on that very nice one thing that's worth to think about with the mouth in this particular case is uh whether it makes sense to uh perhaps take a grab brush here and really pull on the corner of the mouth towards the outside here if you look at the result in 3D look at these particular lines do we have on the texture there I actually pull on the corner of the mouth towards the outside and perhaps I can even play here with our fall off perhaps try a sharper fall off just for the sake of it now see how I can try to maybe get these to be a little bit straighter of course it's kind of destroying a lot of the work that we have done but if it means that we have slightly more resolution for the lips that might not necessarily be a bad thing and here yeah I'd be interested to also perhaps pull here on the lower lip towards the bottom within the UV editor try to there to perhaps get a little bit more of those taxables going on on the lower lip our lips are now a little bit more consistent with what is happening elsewhere feels like a big change that perhaps you should have done earlier but it doesn't really matter too much as long as the result is uh the good result in the end it's just a little bit of waste of time really but okay so let's do a little bit more uh unwrapping then although unwrapped will want to uh compress the lower lip here so I don't want to do too much of that I have to actually be kind of wary about that might not be the better tool to use here in some zones like this here if I take a few of these uh vertices right here you can see in the 3D viewport there's a little bit of that zigzagging that's kind of going on here but if I do and unwrap that is constrained to the u-axis I can actually clean some of that up here one thing I could try is to bring a few more of those uh text holes that we have under the jaw and perhaps within the neck perhaps bring some of those textiles to be uh part of the chin so I could actually take my grab brush here and try to grab the zone of the chin perhaps the zone of the antutuja and uh pull it down here a little bit which in turn will bring a little bit more texels towards the chin of course the neck will always look like it's denser because it's a cylinder of a smaller radius than what the head is of course the neck will always be denser okay let's take a look at the ears if there's anything interesting that we can do about that let's see if it if there is a way to um perhaps get something slightly more uniform but I really don't want to have to add any more seams to this that's the problem so this this might actually be quite hard this is already really really good to be honest so it really probably isn't much need to do any kind of work on this I can just pull this towards the outside I'm probably going to get a little bit more of those textiles going on for the helix it's kind of a way to bring a little bit more resolution to that zone I kind of doubt we'll be able to use any kind of relaxation within the ear yeah it doesn't work all that great so really I think our only tools are this grab brush and perhaps we could try unwrapping but there too I feel as if we unwrap after we have stretched the unwrap is going to try to bring us back to our starting point so there might not be much that we can do here it's already a little bit better I mean this is definitely good enough so yeah these UVS are pretty good overall I think we're ready to do the mirror I've been holding you in suspense for long enough so within our 3D viewport let's make sure we're in polygon mode in this particular case I'll turn my viewport overlays back on here as well let me hold alt and middle click until we are looking at the face from straight on let me turn on x-ray let me turn on wireframe kind of Hasting the grid though let me take let me get rid of that here so I really just want to do a selection of the side of the face that I want to copy the UVS over to the other side of the face and I want to make sure to be very precise with the section that I'm doing so I really want to make sure that I'm selecting all of the polygons that is on one side of the face so let's use our select box in this particular case let me do a box selection of all the polygons on this particular side and let me really zoom in to make sure that I really have caught everything because you can see that some of these polygons have not been selected so all these polygons here yeah see so that's a perfect selection for one side of the face and then within our edit tab here let's go to copy paste UVs for this strategy here let's select end to n and if you look at the tooltip here it says a number of faces must be equal to source so we are copying since this mesh is perfectly symmetrical we'll copy all of the polygons from one side to the other side which means we will have an equal selection in the end so let's do an end to end strategy here and where it says copy here let's uh copy we can just use default here this is just useful if we have more than one UV set or more than one UV map you'll see the other UV maps in there but since we only have one here we might as well just use default with fire selection then that has been copied over let's do Ctrl I that will invert our selection and of course you will wind up having the exact same number of polygons that are selected the other side and then let's go to paste here and do a default paste and this will probably look broken like this and uh you may actually be thinking right now that it did not actually work properly but everything is fine so far let's go and the bottom left here within paste UVS and in there let's do a flip copy do these and after that we want to play around with this rotate copied UV little slider that is right here and uh take a look at this if I put this to number one you can see how now all our UVS have been copied over properly you can see that our seams are kind of looking at a little bit awkward there so let's just turn off here where it says seems so that we do not change or add new seams in here and take a look at that it's as simple as that we now have mirrored UVs let's go back to our UV window so of course now all our UVS are overlapping which we obviously do not want to keep in the end so we want to select the side of the face that has been mirrored and we want to flip them yet again and then move them on the other side of the UV window so that we can merge the two halves of the face together let's go to select let's select flipped which we'll select for us all of the polygons that have been flipped we can hold G now to move these over within UV then let's go to mirror and do a mirror on the x-axis here you go let's go to Edge mode here and before we do our merging let's just make sure that the middle seam is a completely nice and straight because right now my seam is not actually perfectly straight so actually let me just grab all these vertices here make sure I only have the vertices here that are creating the midline of the face Let's do an alignment of those just like that in fact we should probably do the same thing pretty vertices on the mirrored side and then while being in Edge mode let me hold out to select the edge Loop that's in the middle of the face do the same thing on the bottom press alt V press enter and you might have to play with some of these uh options if snap eye lens is turned off for some reason you can see the kind of result we're going to get that's not very pretty let's make sure that that is turned on this particular value here will allow you to select which will be the island that will be merged to we could actually complete this by just uh either relaxing or doing a quick unwrap on the scene that's in the middle to make sure that there are no stretching here so perhaps I can't just grab these particular vertices here let's make sure that we are grabbing them in a symmetrical fashion of course I could try a bigger box selection if I want as long as I'm making sure that it is mirrored I mean it's not strictly necessary for dzvs to be completely mirrored of course but why not at this particular stage right another thing that I could do is to get this particular UV Island to be at the perfect Center here of our UV window so let me just uh in fact let's switch over here to UV select mode to select Island let's select the island afterward let's turn on Snap let's snap to increment now let's do an absolute grid snap you can see that when I'm going to move it then it's going to snap the center of our selection directly to the center of the UV window you can see how this particular Edge Loop now is directly centered in the middle of our zero to one space at least on the x-axis and it also means that here I might actually have to move these vertices inwards a little bit they're not quite fitting within the zero to one space so we need to squish them in just a little bit and take the vertices down let's turn off snap let's grab the vertices from both sides and let's try doing a scale on this so press s and then press X to constrain to the x-axis and that looks pretty good to me yeah it looks pretty good to me so yeah take a look at these UVS pretty nice right but one thing I could do though is to do a little bit more of that unwrap on the vertices near the center line because I can see a little bit of wobbliness in this particular Zone let's try to see if we can address that so that's all we have to do for the face itself now we want to Simply pack in the rest of the UE islands that we are missing we can start with the ear it's going to be the the harder one to fit in there although looking at the amount of dead space that we have I don't think it's going to be that hard to be honest I mean we could even maybe fit the ear in here although no we can't fit both ears in here I would like to place these ears in a symmetrical fashion if I can they actually fit quite nicely here of course one thing that's important is to also keep a little bit of padding around these particular UV Islands you could be tempted to kind of pack this in extremely tightly like this but if you do that you're actually going to start to have issues around the borders of your UVS because of something called MIP mapping I believe I've made a YouTube video on that particular topic so you can go and check that out uh can be a complex topic to talk about but uh simply keep in mind that it's important that you keep a little bit of a space between your UV shells how much space should you keep well I've kind of always just more or less eyeballed it really you just want to keep an appreciable Gap at let's say this particular distance here perhaps you still want to see a slight gap between your UV shells it's not very scientific but if you can actually spot a nice gap between your UV shells at this particular distance you'll be fine all right so let's scale this down a little bit so that we keep a little bit of that padding around uh the circumference of the ear so perhaps uh something about this here if I look at it from this distance again I have a little bit of a gap here and that's going to be totally fine now that we're done placing this particular UV Island that is here we want to copy its UVS over to the utter ear in a symmetrical fashion so that the other ear winds up perfectly symmetrical on the other side of the texture but before we actually do that let's actually pack in the other UV islands that we have that we want to have symmetrical in this particular case so the back of the ear and the eye bag for the mouth bag since uh we will have to do essentially the exact same approach as we have done for the main UV island of the head we'll have to symmetrize it and then we will have to merge the seam that's in the middle and then we'll snap it to the middle here so we'll fit it right here within our texture space but okay so we want to move in the eye bags in the back of the ear so this particular UV Island that's the proper one so I want to move this one so that it is about here let's keep a nice Gap there too between this particular the island and all the other ones that we have I think I have to scale down the back of the ear here a little bit you can see the color here if I'm getting a color that's uh cyan that means that the size here is pretty good in relation to the rest of the UV islands that we have we're getting a pretty uniform textual density and then we can fit here the mouth bag in the space that is left right here there's a few more steps for the mouth bag so I guess we'll do it afterward we can now copy these three UV Islands over to the other side in a symmetrical fashion we're going to use the same tool that we have used so far so the copy paste UVS and if this kind of screws up then I have a workaround for you so in my 3D window then let me turn on the viewport overlays here once again so I can see which are the UV islands that we want to copy over let's press L here while our cursor is over the ear we want to copy that over and uh in this particular case I guess I can select linked by scene because I actually want to select the back of the ear as well and I want to select the eye bag as well so just like we've done before let's go to copy here within copy paste UVS let's do a copy on this and now I also cannot press Ctrl I to inverse my selection so we'll just have to do the same selection but on the other side of the face select the ear first and then let's press L to select the eye bag and then let's do a paste on top of this let's turn on flipped UVS and let's play around with this rotate copied UV value that is right here see if we can get these to work quite well yeah that's looking pretty good here that's pretty cool let's turn off seams here back of our ears looking pretty good too and the inside of the eye is also looking really good so I mentioned that there was a bug uh we're not getting it in this particular case but I'll still show you the workaround because perhaps you will actually get a problem the kind of bug is that sometimes uh some of these even if you play with these particular values here of the rotate copied UV slider that is right here even if you turn on flip copy duties it's possible in certain cases that not all of these polygons actually seem to have copied and flipped over properly you may actually get some of these that still look like they're kind of rotated you know if I put this particular value here back at zero you can see how some of these faces you can see that the UVS are simply rotated and so there might be situations where even though you have the same number of polygons that is selected on both sides of the face you may not actually be able even by playing around with these values right here to completely get the UVS to look like they are in the proper orientation so if that's the case I have a workaround for you but uh we'll do that at a second stage let's just finish this here first okay so back within our UV editor because we have sync selection that is off means that the only UV islands that we see are the ones that are currently selected within our 3D viewport so this should be actually fairly simple let's do a box selection to select all our UV islands and real now it's just as simple as doing a mirror H here within our text tools but you can see that if I do that right now the center of the mirror is actually the center of the selection as opposed to the center of the zero to one space there so we can fix that here very very simply by simply going within the pivot drop down menu that is right here and selecting here the 2D cursor of course you gotta also make sure that your 2D cursor is centered first so if that's not the case for some reason of course hold shift and do a right click to move the cursor over and therefore turn on Snap here actually get rid of your selection just in case turn on Snap here once again snap to increment absolute grid snap and just hold shift and do a right click until your 2D cursor snaps perfectly within the center of your zero to one space let's reselect our Islands let's redo our mirror and there you go if I reselect everything now within our 3D viewport you can see that now these UV Islands have been copied over properly okay so what's this workaround that I've been talking about if for some reason copy paste UVS doesn't work for you what else can you do here I'm going to take the UVS of this particular ear here I'm just going to move them in a different location so that the colors actually look different between her two ears right there okay so let's say that once again I want to take the UVS over this particular ear and I want to copy them over to this particular ear but not using copy paste UVS so is there another way we could actually do that well the answer is yes and so we'll be using transfer UVS instead now if we just inspect here transfer UVS very quickly here if I turn on the little check box that is there if I select actually the first ear so the ear that I want to copy over so this one here within the transfer UV you can see that I can actually press copy right here but if I do that if I try to do a copy here while I have this particular ear that is selected you can see that I'm actually getting warning here at the bottom that it says that two faces must be selected which is very awkward because you could be wondering well if I ever want to copy more than two faces over what's going to happen then what transfer UV does that it walks through the topology that you have and it reconstructs the UVS based upon that I suppose that my explanation can't really go deeper than that okay so the way the transfer UV works is that you simply select two polygons that you have over your mesh and just for the sake of safety I like to select polygons that are near the midline of the character I don't know if that actually makes a difference or not but I like to select two polygons starting from the midline of the character there so we'll select the two polygons here that are at the base of the neck and I'm going to select first the polygon that is closest to the center line and then I will afterward hold shift and select the polygon that is right next to it and with those two polygons that are selected we can now click transfer UV and now what we want to do is to select the two polygons that are opposite of that and now we can paste so if I just click paste here you'll see that once again our UVS are going to become completely broken if while I do this paste if I invert the normals here within our transfer UV dialog box right here take a look at that we have transferred our UVS in a symmetrical fashion from one side of the face to the other side of the face so I guess if all you want to do is mirror the whole UVS of an object this is a very complicated way of doing so but you can now see that our ear has inherited the UVS that we want to give it so now we can use our copy paste UVS over this this is the only UV Island for which we want to keep these particular UVS so it's going to be the only one that we are going to select here and now let's do copy on top of this here with these UVS that are now stored within the clipboard we can actually undo the transfer UVs to go back to our original state but the UVS that we have copied are still in the clipboard so if I reselect this ear here and now do a paste on top of this take a look at this well obviously this is looking broken yet again because we are flipping the UVS which we do not want to do in this particular case so let's get rid of that here now let's put this value here back at zero and there you go so we did in the end use copy paste UVS but uh it was not to do the mirroring if you will so I know this seems a little bit complicated but this is something that you can do if ever the copy paste UV doesn't work for you for some reason you can use transfer UV in this way to copy your UVS over symmetrically so for the mouth bag we'll do the same thing that we have done for the face I'll just skip over this with you because this is essentially the same steps as we have done for the main UV island of the face and there you go this is what our final UVS look like for this head perhaps there's a few areas of improvement that are very minor perhaps these kind of UVS here we could have perhaps found a way to make them nice and continuous on the other side of the face as opposed to kind of cave in like this and create a bit of a v-shape but keep in mind those are the vertices that are here that are starting to create the curve here at the top of the head within our UV Island right here so yeah they kind of more or less always will have a shape that might look a little bit like this it is also some of these UVS that are here some of these uh lines that are here could perhaps continue across in a way that's a little bit more straight perhaps this is one of those places where we could actually try this uh shared vertex here because it means that if I select this particular vertex here it's going to move the vertex it's on the other side so maybe I could actually uh try to see what happens if I take some of these vertices and slide them down a little bit we're gonna get something here it's going to be a little bit more um I suppose round for these UVS perhaps yeah I see that that kind of works yeah it's a little bit better it's probably as good as we're going to get it let me do a box selection on these vertices here do the same on the other side let's do a quick unwrap on this okay there you go there you go that wasn't all that necessary but why not right this seam is looking nice and clean too these UVS are really solid very very happy with these so there you go that's the whole workflow of how to unwrap a hit within blender but we're not actually done with this class yet because I want to finish this class with projection and baking the vertex color that we have done on our head so that the next class we can start to work on the tertiary details for this particular phase first of all Let's uh bring back the visibility of our high risk there so we have our hi-res and our lores within the scene here let me get out of edit mode for now let's go to our modifier properties here and I still have a displacement top of this let me just go ahead and bake this in so what we're essentially going to do is that we will subdivide this particular head and then we will project the details we'll do what is essentially a shrink wrap we will essentially just shrink wrap the subdivided version of this particular head over to the high poly that we have so first we want to subdivide the Head we'll use a multi-res for that then we'll do a shrink wrap which we will apply one thing I want to do first though is just to check the vertex groups because we're not going to project everything we had created vertex groups that were useful so that not the whole had shrink crafts but only part of the hit shrink wraps you know we don't want to shrink wrap the eye creases we don't want to shrink wrap in the eye bags we don't want to shrink wrap the mouth bag of course because those things don't exist on the high res so I just want to check that vertex group because we'll use essentially the same vertex group to continue to exclude the shrink wrap so let me go back here within edit mode let me go with invert text here and let's go within object data properties right here where we have our vertex groups and right here so let me just select that right there yeah see let's press a little bit bigger than what I actually kind of wanted to be in the end I think I want to exclude some of these vertices so in this case let me just click remove here it's going to remove all these vertices from the vertex group so now the vertex group is uh completely empty as you can see I'll just do uh Ctrl Z here to bring back this particular selection so after having removed all these vertices from the vertex group now I'm just going to go in here with the lasso so I'm going to hold Ctrl shift and do right click and I'm just going to lasso away some of these extra vertices that I think should not be part of the vertex group anymore and those are these here that are on the side of the face also I'll just turn on Warframe to make sure that I'm not hitting the other side of the face or hitting any vertices that I wouldn't want to be hitting this particular case so let's get rid of all of these here if I can avoid to shrink wrap the year I'll be quite happy because I know that some of these are very delicate structures will have a tendency to shift around a little bit too much since the ear is asymmetric so all the vertices that will remain in our selection will be varices that will not be projected so let me just deselect a whole lot of these vertices here so that we can project what will be most of these but not necessarily all of these hopefully these won't give us too many problems the eyes could be a little bit tricky I guess I want to project everything up to the eye creases and projecting part of the lower lid may not be a bad idea either because those were in the right location mostly so actually let me remove the uh lower eyelids from our selection I'll try not to hit the eye bag while I'm doing this particular selection right now and for the mouth yeah the mouth is fine I'll keep the current selection that we have Okay so this will be our vertex group so let's assign now and if I deselect and I reselect the vertex group yeah so that's great so let me take my head then let's go back to our modifiers so now on top of this let's add a multi-res in fact let me just take a look here I want to see what's going to happen to the UVs especially around the corner of the mouth here as we subdivide yeah see these are now becoming very nice so I really love what's going on here and UVS around the eyes yeah take a look at this super nice right super clean lines very very nice these are holding up beautifully let me subdivide a second time and what we're going to do we're going to throw a shrink wrap on top of this let's go to add modifier let's add a shrink wrap and we more or less want the same options as we had when we were shrink wrapping in the context of root topology here so let's select our Target here our hi-res there you go vertex group here let's specify the group that we have added and let's click on this little arrow here to make sure that these are not being shrink wrapped wrap method here let's go for Target normal project snap mode we want to snap outside the surface and we could add another subdivision level let me hide the face here let me hide the high res because I want to see what the lores looks like let me select the high-risk here press h to hide it and for the low res in fact I think we can get rid of this texture now we don't need that anymore and factors as a vector now let's just get rid of that here completely that's just let's just remove that okay here we go image texture here within base color we can also remove that let's play around the color here a little bit yeah that's fine okay yeah I think look at this looking pretty good right so that is at uh only 720 000 triangles is that right I believe that's right so divide this once more every time we subdivide this we will reacquire more of those details that we had sculpted and I think we could do at least one more level not quite sure what's going on here though that's kind of interesting we'll have to take a look at that we can kind of see the Border here of the vertex group that's okay we can just smooth that once we have done with our projection here we'll just do a quick smooth on top of this and that will look good same thing with this here I'm not quite sure what's going on probably something to do with the shrink wrap I'm really tempted to try and find what is the reason for this so let me just uh investigate this a little bit so we're looking at the high res right now and uh if we take a look on the inside of that oh yeah okay I found it see it's probably because of this here it's probably because of this thing here whatever that is let's just go in scope mode and do a little bit of smoothing on this this will probably be enough to get rid of that and there you go we fixed the problem so the problem was coming from our high res this color is pretty pretty intense yes this is looking really clean right now the higher we can go with the multi-res the more detail we will be able to reacquire of course from the high poly so essentially we are limited by the polygons that we have on our new IRS or on our lowest that is subdivided so the higher we can go for the multi-rest the more we will be able to get some of those very sharp details we can still go at least one more I believe so here so let's go here and subdivide this yet again this has given us here a few sharper details if we look at the eyebrows now of course our goal is to sculpt to share details ourselves on top of this so ultimately it doesn't really matter to keep these but so this is pretty good I'm not going to attempt Fate by subdividing this one step further it's very simple to collapse the shrink wrap we simply have to go within our modifier and click on the little drop down arrow that is right here and do an apply and that's going to collapse the shrink wrap so that the data of the shrink wrap is now part of the multi-res if I play here with the level that is in the viewport you'll see what I'm talking about here I can go back all the way down to our lowest subdivision level as you can see and even if I go back here to our highest subdivision level we still have all that data that we had baked out with the shrink wrap that is now part of the multi-res take a look at how great of a work that he has done with these eye creases right there there's a very slight sharp border here but we can't just move that away very very simply there but other than that this data is extremely clean if we go within sculpt mode you can see that we still have our face sets that are there and uh as we go up here so let me press let me write five here to go to our highest subdivision level here you can see how this particular face set here the border to this face set here is still nicely following the nasolabial fold and we have those face sets around the eyes that are nicely following the shape of the eyes so this is still working really really nice for us and of course it means that we can now take our sculpting brushes and we can go to town and start to sculpt some very high frequency detail on this if we wanted to which of course we want to that's the next thing that we will do here so we can erase the old high poly from this particular scene we don't need it anymore after we have done one last step which is to reacquire the Albedo because we have painted an Albedo on this head and we want to keep that here so we don't want to lose the work that we have done on the Albedo of course the only thing in this particular case though is that the Albedo here has been painted using vertex color and unfortunately we cannot do that using multi-res multi-rest does not support vertex color Beyond vertex color for the lowest subdivision level which isn't all that useful because the lowest subdivision level is quite low res so it would just give us some very diffuse splotches of color to work with when we want to keep all this nice detail there so we're essentially going to bake out our first texture we'll bake out the vertex color pass that we have done on our old high-res we'll bake that out to a texture on the new head so the lowest it has been subdivided we'll bake that out as a texture we'll be able to use that for display purposes and we will continue the Albedo from that particular base at a later Point within the future so we can finish our class with this I'll press Ctrl Z here to snap the old high-risk back to its original location make sure you save your seat at this stage because we will have to collapse the multi-arez yet again so you can just reload your scene later on and reacquire to multi-arez in there we're going to keep this very simple we're not going to do any kind of projection from high poly to low poly in this particular case we will do something that's going to be a lot simpler there so we're going to collapse the multi-res I'm going to apply it and then afterward we will add another modifier to this which will be a data transfer within the data transfer then let's select our source which is our high poly or head high in this particular case a van where it says vertex data here let's click on this and say that we want to transfer the colors what we're essentially doing is that we are projecting the vertex colors of the old high poly onto the new high poly but we're not actually seeing it here because the vertex color is not what is currently applied within the material so let me isolate this here and then let's go afterward within our material properties and where it says base color then let's actually switch this over to a color attribute if this looks completely black like this it means that there's actually no vertex color channel on the mesh so far so let's actually add one of those let's go within our object data properties where it says color attributes in here so click on the little plus that is right there you can keep the default options this will simply add a Vertex color channel to your mesh and here you go we can go back to our modifiers we can now apply the data transfer and our new high poly now has the vertex color of the old high poly now as we said the only problem with this is that this does not work with the multi-res so if I was to reconstruct the multi-res in this particular case to go back to the lowest subdivision level we would actually lose the vertex color actually we would preserve the vertex color but we would wind up with vertex color that is very blurry because it would be applied on the vertices at the lowest subdivision level so it's a bit of a limitation of blender that we cannot actually see the vertex color using multi-res but perhaps in a future version that will be addressed but for now please what we simply want to do now is we want to bake this out as a base color texture and then we will apply that through the Shader afterward so we'll do that using text tools so let's go back within our UV editor so I'll have it here open on the side let's select our head here let's go with an edit mode this uh might get a little bit heavy though yeah that's kind of slow I mean if this creates problem then of course more traditional baking using High poly low poly could actually work but we will do that in a future class let's go to baking now and where it says tangent normal let's select base color we'll be baking out using the same size that we have specified here so we'll bake out an AK texture let's press bake and we're done we're just not seeing the texture here because the wireframe here is uh taking over but if I turn off here the overlays there you go we have our texture now we can now save this out let's go to image let's go to save as save this out somewhere we can close this I'm going to reload the scene now because I had applied the multi-res it's going to be simpler just to reload the scene and then to have to unsubdivide the mesh okay so I've reloaded the scene here and we have baked out our vertex color so it means that I can now finally delete this here this was our old high-res and this is our new head then I can move this over within my collection that is right here and if you want to complete this work then let's go back within our material properties where it says base color let's select a image texture let's open the texture that we have picked out and there you go we finally have our base color that is applied on our new lores which is also now the high res of course on which we will continue to do our sculpting so that's all of the steps involved in taking your head that had been sculpted using remesh doing a read apology for it doing UVS projection taking out the vertex color and now we are finally in a position where we can start our tertiary details or we could even take this head and we could even do a skinning pass on top of it if we wanted to so I hope this was interesting ultimately I'm not sure how many hours of content this will have been in the end if you consider the retopology classes unwrapping projection it's a pretty involved process to re-topologize something of course if this is the first time that you go through this particular process it probably will take you a while to go through all of these technical steps but although it seems like there are a lot of steps that we had to go through when you're experienced you can actually go through these steps fairly quickly I mean root apology will take some time then for the unwrapping you're not always necessarily have to go to the degree of detail that we have when we're unwrapping this particular head projection is also relatively quickly there so really it's usually the root apology that takes the most time and depending on the complexity of an object that you are dealing with you could probably get done with all of these steps in perhaps about a day or two of course if you want to re-topologize the full character you can probably schedule at least a week of your time to be able to do that properly I'm very much looking forward to explore with you the next steps in the process of creating this head which will be to create our tertiary details which is skin pores fine wrinkles perhaps continue to do a little bit of polish on the anatomy of this head because this is a lightness so that particular process feels never ending we'll also take a look at the eyes not necessarily the eyeballs themselves I'm quite happy with these but how can we get a transition mesh in there from the eyelids to the eyeballs how can we get some eyelashes in there we'll do the full process with this particular head or at least that is the goal as of today there so there's a lot of very interesting content coming and I'm quite glad that we have gotten these steps out of the way retopology unwrap because we've gotten a lot of those technical steps out of the way and we can now have some fun to Simply improve this head from an artistic standpoint and uh really start to add features upon features that's going to make this head look much nicer in a render so I can't wait to get started with what comes next for watching this particular class good luck with your unwrap and your projection and I will see you next time take care

Channel: Outgang

Views: 51,468

Keywords:

Id: hyzLjXw8RFk

Length: 177min 26sec (10646 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 29 2022