Senior Thesis I: More UVs and Hair Modeling

 

Wow.

Hell of a different one tutortial can make. After seeing that the single piece mesh for the hair was becoming really poly heavy, hard to model and just not accurate, I decided to scrap the idea. It is a  few hours wasted, but the alternative is proving to be much more promising. After watching a Lynda tutorial on modeling hair with NURBS curves and extruding along them, it appeared in my opinion to produce a much more accurate result. I set about making a duplicate of D'artagnan's body and smoothing it, which would make the drawn curves hug the contours of his head more precisely. After hours of sculpting and deforming, the new hair looks much closer to what the character looks like. Also despite the exaggerated, cartoony look of the strands, the potential final results will probably be more similar to the style of Persona's modeled hair, which was very simple.

The UV layout process also continues to be a hurdle. Initially the Auto Unwrap UVs Tool that comes with Maya's Bonus Tools seemed very useful, and after watching its tutorial of the AREA I used it successfully in other projects.

Here's an example of some of the testing I did with the tool. It is an upper leg piece from another project, which unwrapped quite nicely and allowed me to sculpt in Mudbox.

However, the nature of the tool I found to be somewhat limiting as well. When used on a seamless mesh which will have multiple shells, such as D'artagnan's, it seem that you have to create all of the shell borders all at once. Using the tool on an isolated section of the mesh produced favorable results, but when attempting to crerate another shell with the tool, the previously shell would either revert or become distorted. Even going through the process of laying out borders for the entire mesh produced questionable results, as many of the shells produced were very stretched and distorted compared to shells unwrapped individually.

With these things in mind, I will research if there are ways to protect individual shells by baking or other means. In the meantime I will focus on the more important UV shells that need to be created, namely the clothing sections. The planar and auto mapping system proved mostly effective previously,  and I have been working towards stitching UVs together.