UVW Map

Now then, I'd already had one shot at using the Unwrap UVW modifier before but realised i'd forgotten to produce lips and attach the ears meant I had to stop. To be honest im glad, if you take at view at one of my earlier entries the texturing was a shocker, I had patches of the face where they shouldn't have been and it was too easily distinguishable between the areas.



So the first stage of producing the texture is to layout the coordinates for each area of the face within 3DS.

By adding a chequered material you are able to see what areas of the head are stretched. This is not a good thing as it means the quality of the texture on that area of the head will lack quality.

I moved the vertices within the Unwrap modifier as much as possible until the areas were less stretched (see below for before and after shots)



I decided to go with attempt two as the stretched areas were more around the back of the head and I hoped that with the hair being there it wouldn't cause much problem in loss of detail.



The squares around the face were relatively even so I decided to move onto the next stage to remove any inverted or overlapped faces.



The inverted faces were fairly easy to fix. The majority of the time it was where multiple quads were flowing into each other so it meant just defining each quad more clearly by moving the vertices.
Other times it could be where a quad wasn't really clear and appeared more like a triangle or a really odd shape.

The only inverted face I did not managed to correct was the nose. I believe this is due to the poor standard of modelling when producing the nose. I am unsure how much this will effect the texture map result.



After deciding to leave the inverted nose as it was I moved on to edit the overlapped faces of the UVW Map. I found this a simple task to complete, with only two overlapped faces to deal with.