Unwrapping the Rest of the Character
Unwrapping the rest of the character is pretty straightforward. Let’s go over a brief explanation of the most important parts of the process so you can understand what to expect. Figure 8.9 will give you an idea of what we’ll be doing in this section and the objects that will be unwrapped: the glove, the boots, the pants, the jacket, the cap, and the neck detail.
Unwrapping most of the parts was fairly quick and easy. The whole process took roughly 20 minutes. The pants, for example, needed only a simple seam along the inner leg, just like a pair of real trousers, and the unwrap worked nicely. Keep in mind that the Mirror modifier did its part as well.
For the hand, a seam was marked all along the palm, passing through the bottom part of the fingers. The resulting UVs were adjusted with the Live Unwrap tool, especially the island that represents the top part of the hand; it had the sides of the fingers in it, so its shape was somewhat spherical.
Note
As you can see, there’s only one hand: the reason is that we only modeled one in the previous chapter and didn’t apply a Mirror modifier to it; instead, we duplicated and mirrored it. It would have been helpful to show you a result with two hands, but it’s better to unwrap the hand and duplicate it afterward so that we don’t need to unwrap both hands separately.
The elements of the cap were basically unwrapped just as they were. No seams were used at all—just select everything and unwrap!
The piece at the neck was simple, too. It just needed a loop all around the interior bottom section so Blender could unfold it properly.
The jacket was a little trickier: it was first unwrapped in three pieces—the body, the arms, and the flaps. Later, after adjusting the UVs a little using the Live Unwrap and Proportional Editing tools, the arm was joined to the side of the jacket, first using the Stitch tool and then snapping and moving some vertices around. The purpose of that was to have no seam in the shoulder, as the jacket will have the shoulder pads painted in the texture for that area, and having a seam in the middle would not be a good idea.
If you want to see how the UV Maps look, you can go to the next section on packing the UVs. Right now, each one of the UV islands takes the whole space and showing them together would be rather abstract. That’s why packing is important!