How to unwarp those pants ...

[Zak Kozlov]

Hello

 

Seriously , I'm about to go insane hehe

I been rushing for the 3rd day on this trying to get the pants straight , like default SL pants map is basicly

http://i42.tinypic.com/2mo1ilv.png

 

I tried project from view , project from view with 4 different angle and weld parts,  tried to detach in the middle and adjust each vertice manualy , tried to detach at the legs level and do the same ... I always achieved what i want .. straight map and all fine for most parts .. but thats never perfect, there is always something not perfectly straight , or some faces stretching that just cant be fixed in any way

 

This cant be that complicated hehe I mean I dont think anything is easy in doing mesh ( i'm starting ) but this is just a pain ... there MUST be a lil function I dont know about and that my hours of googling didnt pointed me that will make my life more simple hehe ... is there?

 

edit: this is the kind of map im trying to achieve: http://i43.tinypic.com/voq2xd.png

I did this with cutting the 2 legs as you can see .. then weld them back and adjust vertice individualy for hours ... to get what I want , but with a bad stretch in the middle that just cant seem to be able to get fixed

[Dilbert Dilweg]

Maybe you might do better with using Remesh modifier before you unwrap to get your topology resurfaced

Here is an image before and after remesh

http://wiki.blender.org/uploads/d/d4/Remesh-text-00.png

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.62/Remesh_Modifier

Not sure if it will help but maybe using the decimate modifier will help in reducing your vertices a bit

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual/Modifiers/Generate/Decimate

 

Make sure you are in front ortho view before unwraping

[Maeve Balfour]

Assuming I'm reading your question correctly..... So, you want your pants UV to look like the SECOND image (straight legs parallel to each other)?

If that's the case, you will be condemning yourself to hideous texture distortion between the legs, as you have already said.

The FIRST image you linked to (legs spread out in a V-shape) is actually the better one to texture on, in regards to minimal / reduced texture distortion. The polys look to be far more evenly flattened, and hence will be far less stretched when textures are applied.
Sure, the straight leg UV you are trying to achieve (referring to your second linked image) will probably be easier to texture visually in 2D, but the areas between the legs near the top will never be capable of having textures applied without serious distortion issues.
I think you have modeled in some creases and wrinkles into the mesh geometry? If so, you will probably never get a perfectly flat UV - it's something you will have to work around with the texturing (this is a fact of life in UV-mapping - it's always a matter of compromises in one way or another).

A general tip for setting UV seams with clothing... make the cuts so they would look logical for clothing seams in RL - it makes it a lot easier to reduce the obviousness of the UV island edges. The gain from this, is that you will have neat seamwork and textures that shouldn't be heavily distorted.

UV-mapping is as much an artform in mesh as the actual model making process. Good quality UV mapping for SL meshes is I think just as important as the model making process itself, since the texturing can help make up for the reduced detail of (responsible) low-poly modeling.

:matte-motes-smile:

[Madeliefste Oh]

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Maeve Balfour wrote:

UV-mapping is as much an artform in mesh as the actual model making process. Good quality UV mapping for SL meshes is I think just as important as the model making process itself, since the texturing can help make up for the reduced detail of (responsible) low-poly modeling.

:matte-motes-smile:

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That is so true.

I often find myself spending more time on making good UV maps then on the model itsself. At first glance I thought making mesh objects would save me much time above making sculpties. And for the modeling that is true, it's much easier and you have much more possibilities with mesh. But the UV mapping makes it time consuming after all.

[Masami Kuramoto]

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Zak Kozlov wrote:

I been rushing for the 3rd day on this trying to get the pants straight , like default SL pants map is basicly

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The default SL pants map is basically crap. The simple truth is that it's impossible to unwrap a pair of legs into less than four major UV islands without heavy distortion. Which is why the default SL pants map has been such a pain to work with in the first place. You don't want to make the same mistake here. Unwrap the pants into four parts and don't worry about the seams because clever texturing will make them invisible. If you mimic the seams of real pants, the basic unwrap function will produce shapes quite similar to RL sewing patterns with minimal stretching. All you need to do next is rotate, scale and arrange the islands in the four quarters of the UV area. This way you can avoid wasting too much space on the pixel bleed area between the islands because the layout will be mipmap-friendly by default.

However, the first thing I would do with your model is fix its topology. Your current mesh is unnecessarily high-poly and doesn't have an edge flow that is animation-friendly. Pockets and other small details should be textured rather than modeled in order to avoid lag and low frame rates. You can bake shadows and/or ambient occlusion from the high-poly mesh to the (unwrapped) low-poly one later, but if you are going to project photos onto the model (aka. "photo-sourcing"), all those little cavities and wrinkles will be included anyway so you don't need to actually model them.

The basic principle of photo-sourcing is to make separate UV maps which are aligned to a set of photos of the RL object you are replicating as a mesh. That's what the "project from view" unwrap functions were made for. Using these projection maps as sources, you can bake multiple photographic angles into the aforementioned 4-piece target UV layout. The bake results will look patchy of course, but since they are all aligned now, you can load them into a layer stack in GIMP and blend the patches into one final texture easily.