headus 3D tools

[illusory]

Hi,

I'm finding whatever cuts i use, i always end up with too much red around the nose and mouth, which means less texture space will be used there, where the most detail is needed.

I've tried various pinning methods, and wondering why the flattening alg. always puulls these areas back to red. When i pin them out, it will even turn blue at the edges of the pins in order to make the mouth/nose areas red again.

Any way to prevent this? I end up doing a lot of hand-editing, which of course is much better in UVLayout than in XSI, but still, i'd rather not be fighting the algorithm all the time.

pics will illustrate. 1st one is pinned out and some areas hand moved to make green. 2nd pic is after some flattening, where the UVs move back to red.

thanks for any advice,
NJ

[headus]

Unfortunately theres not a lot you can do. The face is basically a hemisphere, so unless you are prepared to make cuts right into the center (either up from the neck or down from the forehead) there's always going to be some stretching (red).

I'd say you've done a really good job of minimizing the amount of stronger colored red though. Maybe some relaxing should be done on the user side of the operation ;-)

Hmmm, if its still bugging you though, you could try the local scaling tool under Move/Scale/Rotate ... its explained in the Advanced Local-Scaling video. You'd use the G key to select then detach the face, scale it up a bit with Space-RMB, local scale it, shrink it back down, weld it back in, smooth the weights, then reflatten. That'll give the face area a bit more texture space. The problem you might encounter then though is that the polys surrounding that area will be more distorted than before ... the applied grid texture wont be as square. This is the trade-off for giving the face more space.

Actually, there's a tool currently only available in the version bundled up with CySlice ... it applies that local scaling only to the red shifted polys. It was written for another use, but I'll see what it does on a face ... if it makes any sort of difference, I'll include it in the next general release.

Phil

[headus]

Here's the results from a quick test of that other tool ... face on right is before, and on left is after. Its very subtle, but has washed a lot of the red out of the eyes and ears where it wasn't really a problem anyway, but hasn't done much to the tougher nose and chin.

Anyway, I'll include it in case that subtle difference is important to someone.

Phil

[illusory]

Hmmm...very interesting ideas. Really, the grid matching is not so important in this case. I'm finding that, for a particular kind of texture painting that scale is really important. The stretching around the face gets really noticeable when painting in fractally sorts of skin textures. But also the compressing in the neck and other areas.

I'll look into the local scale use for this. I've also been toying with breaking up areas and stitching them back together (since it's so easy in UVL). If you or anyone has found any good patterns for this, it would be cool to post them here.

The other tool you mention sounds like it would be very useful! great idea to include it in next release.

thanks,
NJ