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Painless organic unwrapping tutorial

“Painless Organic Unwrapping” by Bill Quillinan
Not a big difference, but I like this outer edge better than the previous one. At this point, the UV map is fairly clean, the shapes are recognizable, and the part we are interested in painting (Adrianna’s Face) covers more image real estate than the part that will be covered by her hair. Select all the UV map vertices, and scale the map down to fit on the image grid. Pin all vertices. Now we can zoom in on the interesting parts and do some concentrated tweaking. Besides searching for and fixing any doubled faces (under the chin and near the ear) I generally tweak the eye, mouth and nose shapes to be a bit closer to the model, to make painting the map a bit more like portrait painting. I’ll generally adjust the shape of the eyes, the nostrils (especially the tiny cluster of vertices that occurs inside the nostril) and the corners of the mouth. I look for zig zag lines that in the model are straight, and I adjust edges flowing away from openings (eyes and mouth) to radiate from the center of the opening (more or less.)

Fig 11 Tweak Shapes and Pin Everything
The UV map is now ready to be checked for stretching. There will be some stretched spots, there always are, but most of them will be in places that we aren’t really going to see in the finished model, unless she’s bald. We try not to get too stressed about those spots. To check for stretching, add a new image to the UV Image Editor grid, and press the UV Test Grid button in the new image panel. This adds an image to the list of available images, a checkerboard with colorful + signs on the squares, but does not necessarily attach this image to the model. In the 3D window, switch from UV Face Select Mode to Object Mode then back to UV Face Select Mode. Usually the image of the Test Grid will disappear from the UV image grid. Select all faces so the UV map shows up on the UV image grid. Then select the Test Grid image (possibly called “untitled,” the default name) from the list of available images. This time the image should reappear in the UV Image Editor window, and the model in the 3D window will be “painted” with the image.

Fig 12 Adrianna Painted with the Test Grid
If this doesn’t work the first time, try again, but more slowly. It seems that image handling takes a certain amount of time, and if the system doesn’t have enough time to process the image, it simply won’t show up.

Fig 13 Adrianna From Several Angles
 
     

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