'3D Studio MAX'

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"Low Poly Character"by Matt Marshall


I had a Displaced Poly in there too on the upper lip, so I cleaned that up as well. I also moved the overlap of the eyelid (the polys underneath) and the middle two eye vertices down just under the eyelid. I did this more so the whole eye could be textured (without fear of skin looking like it was on the eye). As the overlap area is under the lid, it can be as small as it wants, as long as it's visible to texture the line of eyelid, and eye itself.

After that, I moved around certain elements in order to balance out the head mapping area. Tools I used were Move vertices, Move polys (select this down the Bottom in the options section of the Unwrap window) Detach Edge Vertices, Target Weld and Weld Selected...all the usual things, to get the following result. This is then ready to be halved, then flipped and then lined up exactly. Note the middle isn't exactly a straight line down, the area that won't be halved, will simply extend beyond the half line...and the texture will take care of that element.



This is a selection of the polys I intend on flipping. To make selection easier I selected all the vertices that lie in the middle and scaled them down along the one axis ( To find this, hold down the Scale button at the top left of the Unwrap window). I then selected the Poly select tool, and selected all the polys on the right hand side of the middle line, and then deselected the polys that fell on the left hand of the line...resulting in the final selection. Make sure to hold down shift when moving the faces so that it stays along the same axis.

I then detached the edges ready to flip.



Finally, mirror the selected face along the horizontal axis ( at the top of the Unwrap window ), and then moved it along to overlap the other half of the face (holding shift still to make sure it stays in line) to the corresponding faces.

It should be very close, but I assume you will need to tweak the vertices nevertheless. I use the scale tool a lot to grab the vertices (on a point) and scale them down to the smallest size possible, Alternatively you can weld them together. Although I only recomend this if you KNOW you are going to over lap and don't need to select the side of the face as an entity again...which I do not. And here is your end result. I scaled it up on the horizontal axis a little as it was looking a little thin. (Click on the image to see the map closer)

And just to test it, lets apply a checker map to see how well it mapped. Pull up the material browser and select a new material. Go to it's Diffuse map and select Checker, and Tile it 10 times on the U and V axis. Make it display in the viewport and apply it to the mesh. The intention is to get the checkers as square as possible over the whole mesh...as you can see in this shot, the top of the head will need some work, but other than that it's pretty much good :) It's easy enough to edit the vertices to accomodate this.

After you have seen it at full black and white, tone the two colour types in your checker to something more reasonable to work with. Two similar shades of grey for example.



Here we shall finish off the mouth interior and start on the torso area.



3D-environment

Firstly I grab all the interior faces by either using the Unwrap UVW window, or the main viewport (as some faces weren't grouped with the rest and were loose.

I then used the Planar Map button with the z axis selected in the Unwrap UVW modifier to do a quick planar map of, you guessed it, the z axis on the selected vertices. This moved all the selected faces from a front view in the window (leftover from the original cylindrical map) to a top view.

After that, I then selected elements of the interior mouth as I could using both viewport and window in order to seperate the interior into easily mappable regions by detaching the edge vertices, and moving the faces around. Upper mouth, lower mouth, teeth and 'the rest'. The end result looked like this.

TIP: Sometimes I find 3D Studio MAX a bit iffy when it comes to displaying faces/vertices. Expecially if you detach, move or reconfigure them in some way and the ones that attach to it. They sometimes just disappear.
To remedy this, I sometimes find closing the Unwrap UVW window, and then opening it again 'refreshes' the edit window, and you're good to go.

To select the required vertices, you may need to get rid of some of the faces that are in the way. Select them first, detach and move them, THEN get to the faces you want to edit. In this instance to get to the teeth easier, I had to select 'the rest' first...

Note that I have flipped and overlapped where I could once again to improve quality of the end texture.



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