Collapse the stack so you have your editable mesh / poly and apply an Unwrap UVW modifier to it. Open the subselection and choose Select Faces. Then, turn off Ignore Backfacing in the modifier (if you want to, I just find it more annoying than not to have it on). Hit the big grey Edit button to pull up the Unwrap window, arrange the screen so you can see your model (a bit of it at least) and the window together . Filter your Map Channels to Channel 1 (at the base of the edit window interface) and we are ready to roll!
The same sort of control scheme works in the Unwrap window as it does in the main viewports. Holding the middle mouse button and moving moves around, scrolling the middle mouse button zooms in and out.
A good, tight map is highly recommended as a skill. If you, or anyone else for that matter, were to skin the model you don't want them having to accomodate for a messy map. Do unto others as you would unto you...sort of thing. So make sure you make it neat and tidy.
Now as you can see, my head has been mapped already using the cylindrical map from before. Although there are still some issues with some missing polys and overlapping (such as interior of the mouth etc.
Firstly lets clean up some holes that have turned up in my model (above the ear in this instance). You can see these holes easily by the green lines as they represent lines that are on the edge of the poly (not joined). Sometimes even lines that SHOULD be joined are in green, and simply require welding of vertices to clean it up.
To see where the missing parts are, select a vertex on the edge of the missing hole, a blue vertex should show up elsewhere in the window, this is the vertex (or vertices) that are joined to the selected vertex on you model. To make it VERY clear, go to Display | Show Vertex Connections to pull up the corresponding vertex number.
Firstly we need to clean up the ear to make sure the overlaps are sorted so we can see what we are doing easier. Move the vertices around so that they don't overlap, but keeping roughly the same poly shape as it would on the model...in this case I scaled the whole ear slightly up, in order to make the internal areas fit a little better. Pay attention to the things you are moving...the back overlap of the ear does not have to have as much detail as the front, for example, so you could get away with keeping the thickness of the rear section to a minimum.
Also note the Right Mouse click menu has tools such as Weld Selected and Target Weld. These were used to weld the vertices that were loose as needed. Target Weld is the Main tool to get vertices around where they need to be. Move the Displaced Polys down closer to the ear area to enough to be able to select each vertex. By using Target Weld, Click and Drag the vertices to the corresponding position so that it joins where it needs to be. If a vertex is pretty much exactly where it needs to be, but isn't welded, sometimes a simple click will weld the two, rather than a click and drag.You should end up with a closed mesh, for the ear area at least. And there you have it...one mapped ear!
I did the same with the other side, without much care for the actual ear layout (although getting rid of overlaps to make it easier to sort once more) as I will be flipping the head in order to up the texture quality of the face area. Firstly though, I will clear out the interior of the mouth in order to make that a lot easier to sort out.
I firstly selected the whole interior mouth area, and then start taking out the vertices that fall on the outside by either using the main viewport, or one by one in the UnWrap window. It's easy enough to do as it's easy to see the mouth line (crossover between exterior and interior of the mouth) and the lines the lead from them.
After I had selected all the vertices of the interior, I then used Right mouse click and Detach Edge Vertices in order to do exactly that, moving the selected vertices to somewhere else to clear out the space.
3DTotal
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