UV unwrapping

Hey all, thought I'd comment a little on a handy, albeit slightly old, tool in Maya for UV mapping. There's no doubt about it, everybody has to hate UV mapping. Not too bad on simple box-like objects, but with a character it's a chore, to keep the UVs as undeformed as possible, while keeping them somewhat seam-free so it's easier to work with in Photoshop or what have you. I've managed to map the body of my character with a lot of automatic mapping, which is then sewn back together piece by piece (auto mapping ends up supplying you with 10-20+ small chunks of your model, but they're pretty much distortion free which is much nicer than planar mapping). Pretty straightforward for arms and legs, a little more painstaking for hands.

But yeah, the head is a completely different ballpark. Automatic mapping gave me far toooo many small pieces; may as well just split every polygon up for me to sew like a massive jigsaw. The university/textbook method of planar mapping, then cutting the head in half, then Polygon>Unfold method is alright (it's seen me through 3 years, sort of) but it's some sort of trial and error to unfold half a head properly without it turning into an indistinguishable dinosaur head.

This is what I was going to mention earlier comes in handy. 'New' to 2009 (yes, I am behind with the times) is a nice feature called the Smooth UV Tool. Pretty much what it does is gets rid of all those overlapping UVs that play havok with a mesh with a simple mouse click+drag. For example, here is the front of my character's face, planar mapped away from the rest of the head (I'll sew the rest back on later in chunks)

Those purple bits are overlapping faces in the UV map, which we want to get rid of before we can be sure the mesh is spread out flat on the grid. Thanks to the Smooth UV Tool, all that needs to be done for that is to select the surrounding UVs (let's do the eye as an example). A small dialogue box appears underneath; all we do is click and drag on 'relax' and Maya does the rest for us.

All the overlapping UVs are now inside that eye socket, flattened out nicely. I've also gone ahead and done the same to the other eye and the mouth. The level of distortion of the UV arrangement is minimal as well. Now to pull out those cheeks and chin. This works the same way of selecting the group of UVs, then using the 'Unfold' tool instead.

Obviously this still needs tweaking, but in a few short clicks, the face has been unwrapped in some awkward spots, saving a lot of time.

On a side note, I've got a nice new PC. However the only thing that is on it is Maya. With a lack of Photoshop for the time being, I had a quick go on Windows 7 Paint. It's actually pretty good considering it's Paint, that godawful program that used to destroy .jpgs and resizing images. It does it pretty well this time round. Obviously no Photoshop, but a lot more inviting to use than before.