Unwrap UVW Mapping

It’s all well and good having a head, but a head with no skin? Time to create the skin bitmap that will cover my model and (hopefully) make it look a little less like a Bafta award and more like me!

The process of unwrapping a head and ear

As you can see in these screen grabs I worked my way through creating a UVW map modifier for the head model. Firstly I spread out the face and head, leaving the ear once again as a separate entity. I worked my way through the UVW mapping technique; using a cylindrical selection for the head and selecting the polygons I required using the paint selection tool. I then went about relaxing and spreading out the quads to ensure there were no inverted faces or overlapping edges. This was a relatively simple although time-consuming process. I then went through the same process with the ear, which was a little more difficult due to the complexity of the ear shape.

Eventually I had a UVW map ready for a bitmap skin image to be created upon. 

Normal rendered UVW map

I did check that I had no overlapping or inverted faces although when creating the normal UVW render I saw that I did have a couple that had not previously been picked up. I went back and tried to rectify this although as yet am a little unsure how successful I had been..

At this point I took the unusual looking net of my face into Photoshop and used quick masking and modifying of borders to create an inverted grid like item that could sit on top of the skin map to ensure everything lined up nicely. Using a cut and paste technique, cutting selections from my original photos and pasting them onto my grid of guidelines I created a rough skin-like appearance. I used the clone stamp and patch functions to reduce the harsh lines created by unmatched skin tones. I also used the hue and saturation modifier to try to match the skin tones a little closer. A function I enjoyed using here and one that I found most useful was the warp tool. It helped me in areas such as my hair region as it was difficult to copy and paste different sections of hair as they differed so much in tone and texture, with the hair falling in different directions and also being different shades of colour entirely. I am not too concerned however with the hair as I hope to create a much more realistic hair texture to go on my model rather than a stretched bitmap across the scalp!

After painting my skin tone onto the UVW map guide, I saved and created a new bitmap material in the material editor and dragged it to my model. The effect was a little disconcerting to say the least! I had hoped that after adding some form of skin texture to the model I could see much better whether it looked how I had imagined… It did not (at least I hope it doesn’t look like me!).

The bitmap was very out of focus and pixilated as you can see in this screen grab. Other little problem areas that required fixing were the eyebrows and lips. For this I used the ‘Liquefy’ modifier in Photoshop and moved some of the pixels around to fit the grid lines more accurately. This did help the look of my model although there is still a way to go to get it looking more realistic!