Week 8: Unwrapping Styxx

I've polished off modelling Styxx and have begun to unwrap the mesh. I deleted some overlapping faces (e.g. skin under shirt), so weight painting will be easier down the track.

I used a plugin called Auto-Unwrap 2017 that allows you to choose the seams on different parts of the mesh - it makes unwrapping the UV's much easier.

This tutorial by James Taylor was very helpful:

I struggled to fit the entire mesh in the 0-1 UV boundary, so I split the face, body, lower hair and upper hair into seperate UV maps and applied seperate materials to them.

In class we covered basic rigging; it's complex and I'll need extra help to custom rig the hair for my character. Before that I need to apply some Blendshapes for the facial expressions for my character. Before that I need to rough out a storyboard, so I know exactly what facial expressions/body movement my character needs. Before that I need to record the audio for the animation with Ellie, so I know exactly how my character will be moving the the music.

In the meantime I will create texture maps for Styxx in MudBox. With the Easter weekend holidays, unfortunately I have fallen behind schedule. I don't work well when I'm stressed so I need to focus on prioritising the most important things and taking one thing at a time.

See you next week!