Pelt mapping a head

Go to wireframe

Start in Edge mode

Show no seams

Use loop – it can be used as a pelt seam

 

Make the seam ... click from vertex to vertex and watch for the blue line.

Select the faces and Activate Pelt

Align to the desired axis, by rotating a planar axis ... this is important to align the pelt map.

scale out the stretcher to edge of mat

rotate stretcher so things look symmetrical

hit this btn:  you will see a radical change

you can hit this a couple times:

you can hit this a few times:

turn off pelt to accept the pelt mapping

you can turn on wireframe when you are still in uvw unwrap dialogue

when you use cylindrical etc., you need to turn off the mode to edit the uvws

freeform – corners are for scale.

Complex shapes like ears should be done separately, out of the pelt map.

 

First we are showing putting the seam in the middle of the face, which has obvious limitations:

 

You cans still apply relax etc.

i used the traditional methods

 

downside is the seam in the middle of the face when you collapse the symmetry

 

Now let's try it again, this time aligning the plane axis to the front of the face:

this is the stack to make a model edit after uvw work is done. add edit poly, make the edit, then add another unwrap.

you need to beforehand make ids for everything ... front, back, ears, inside parts like inner mouth, nose and eyes.

or make selection sets

 

remove seams with alt marquee selection

start as a box

planar ...

or cylinder [rotate seam to back]

one pelt pull

push one more time

 

exit pelt map and it takes effect. now we are out of the pelt map tools, use relax, etc., to work on problem areas

 

2 applications of relax

a classic problem area

after 2x relax on one row of faces, and 1 x relax on an adjacent row

keep relaxing any area that looks wrong

use render uvw template to check for problems

here we can see an overlap

make a small size to check things ... make it solid so you can see the red overlaps ... here is is fixed ...

work with turbosmooth on to see the final result

different settings

 

stitch selected can be one or more edges

 

more relax

organize the pieces

Make a big render to texture file, like, 4096x4096. fill the shapes with a flesh tone

RAM and swap space will be important, i am working with 1 gig ram. later on i change to 2 gigs.

You might need to tak the image size down to avoid system problems. i am rendering to 2048 for now.

Be careful editing after the basic UVs are set.

If you forget to preserve UVs, the map will be distorted but you will not know it from looking at the Edit UVs Dialogue

 

The message is, remember to turn of Preserve UVs.

If you forget, re-apply a checkerboard and evaluate.

 

Since I made late-in-the-day changes to the model, without preserve UVs, I have to go back in and make some UVW edits.

When you get near a seam, if you want to keep the general boundary shape of you map unchanged, keep boundary points fixed