Nihteana UV-Mapping

Before moving on to the rigging and skinning of Nihteana, the character I have been working on, I UV-mapped her. Doing this I encountered something which I have not before. Max just did not seem to want to relax the pieces properly, even though there should be no problem with the seams and all the pieces would just shrink and shrink until manually stopped.

 

Eventually I managed to get the pieces to where I wanted them but Max thought otherwise and rearranged some parts of a few pieces when packing them into the UV space. Meaning that I had to re-relax some pieces and try again.



It took me some time and a lot of fitting the pieces together in order to have similar pieces close to each other while leaving as little space as possible. Another issue that I faced was where to place the seam on the arm. There did not seem to be an obvious place for it. Based on the character's behaviour, where she will always strive to be facing the player character and hovering above the ground, I decided to take a risk in its placement and put it on the top back of her arm. After discussing possible solutions this seemed like the lesser of evils as it is the angle which will be seen the least by the camera, although it will most likely be seen.

 

I have to be very aware of this in the texturing process and be careful when I paint around the seam so that it will be as invisible as possible. Working on Tamarrion I managed to make her seams hardly visible at all, but that was probably largely due to the fact that I had polypaint as a base and tried to avoid colour shifts on the seams themselves. I know that it might become a problem, but being aware of it will hopefully help me make the seams look barely visible.