UV Mapping Etiquette

[andykarta]

Hey guys.

I'm a noob and need UV help.

I'm making a superhero body suit for my Daz gen2 model by using a daz gen2 model.  I decapitated him and cut off his hands and feet.  I retopologized to 2000 polys in 3D Coat.  The result is actually pretty awesome in terms of topology for the auto topologer (and I haven't smoothed it out or done any of the other magic things you can do in Coat.) But it's a single cowskin lookin thing and in 3d Coat it shows that there's mild overlap and stretching. 

Now this is not how anyone who makes tutorials on UV mappings that I've seen makes their UV maps.  They make islands or clusters with seams and stuff.  And I'm okay with that. 

But my paint is going to have this hexagonal geometric pattern like armor or whatever.  I want the hexs to be as uniform as possible as my superhero is really buff and this leads to a little stretching.  It's way better than it was but I want to make something I wouldn't be embarrassed to show to non noob animators. 

I'm worried if I put a lot of seams in then it'll cut off the hex pattern at the seams and my guy's paint job will look crappy.

With this model the there is some distortion though it's not major.  Before the darn hexes varied in size very visibly and now you kinda have to look for it.  And again, I can make it better in Coat manually.

But should I cut the bodysuit all up with seams.  I'm probably going to make the collar a separate island because it has detail and I want to try making it huge in UV space.  But that's just me trying to figure stuff out. 

So is there like a formal best practices way of making UV maps that I should follow in weird cases like this.  

In fact does anyone have a suggestion to a really deep study of UV mapping.  I don't mind paying a few sheckles for a book.  But paint should be pretty.  I'm getting there but I don't think Pixar would be happy with the kind of Uving I'm doing....though that's not the best example in the world.  Don't they use PTEX?

 

Edited January 4, 2019 by andykarta

[Carlosan]

Hello 

Hope this help

 

[andykarta]

Actually I found a solution.  After I rigged in Daz I used a bridge called GoZ and UVed  in  icky zbrush.  But yay.  Coat needs more bridges.  Zbrush's UV tools are so not as good.