Cow Skull cont.

After finishing my mine cart track I found some new confidence and techniques in unwrapping UVs so I wanted to give the skull another go. I kind of feel like I am putting a little bit too much time into the skull considering it will be such a small asset and is relatively high poly compared to everything else. I think it is worth it though because I am getting great practice, particularly with the new method of unwrapping the UVs that I had discovered while playing around with the tracks.

There are two discoveries that I found really really useful when it comes to unwrapping the UVs and they are both elements of the projecting UVs, before where I would get stuck is that I would just project the UV in X, Y or Z and then try and make up for the skewness incorrect proportions in the UV Texture Editor manually. But yesterday I realised that you can actually go straight ahead and edit the projection after you project to X Y and Z within Maya's interface and it was so much easier doing it this way, this method was my savoir because I instantly felt 10x more comfortable unwrapping the UVs. The next thing I found out was that you can edit the projection width and height in the Attribute Editor, one of the problems that I was having was that all of my planes had different size UVs and I was trying my best to manually resize them in the UV Texture Editor, but with the Attribute Editor you can just give the height and width an equal value and your UVs will be in proportion, and since you can just keep using the same values over and over it makes it a lot easier fitting together the pieces later on as you don't need to resize anything, most planes fit perfectly together in the UV Texture Editor straight away.

I encountered a problem when I was unwrapping the UVs of the rails before, I unwrapped everything using the aforementioned method, but I left putting the pieces together right to the end, as I said it took a long time just figuring out what went where, but with the cow skull so far I have just been putting things in place as soon as I project the UV making it a lot easier, I won't have to try and figure out where everything goes at the end because I'm just getting it out of the way as I go.

Here is how the cow skull is going so far, it looks a lot better already I think, before each plane had a UV of all different sizes and they were stretched and skewed all over the place, but they fit almost perfectly now other than a few slightly stretched areas that I don't think are that noticeable. I foresee some difficulty in unwrapping the eye sockets, as I just feel like I will be difficult to get the UVs to flow without stretch or overlap, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.