Hello, hello! :biggrin:

Like so many here, I'm new to modeling, and was hoping I could ask for some advice from y'all.  I'm in search of a user-friendly program to handle the UV mapping of my first project.  It's (hopefully) going to be a set of curly hair, provided I stop starting over from scratch constantly, and my problem is that while the mesh itself is -very- bendy, I'd like the UVs to be straight -- more like a grid of squares, so it's easy to texture. 

I'm currently using Hexagon for the modeling and I know it has a built-in UV mapper, but I'm seriously wishing for a function that will snap points to the grid below, much like you can do in Photoshop with paths.  It does have a snap function, but according to the built-in tutorial, manual, and my own experimentation, it snaps based upon the original position of the point, rather than to the grid beneath it.  Argh!  :blink: Is there such a thing as a UV mapper that snaps to absolute coordinates, rather than relative ones?

Thanks for any help!  Even if the program is kinda pricey and not one I can afford yet, for this project, it'd be good to know for the future so I have a goal to shoot for.

The trouble is that UV coordinates are by definition relative. There's no such thing as an absolute UV coordinate. Getting "straight" mapping on a highly curved surface is tricky, and the best way (I think) is to UV map first and model later, if you can manage it. Start with a flat mapped plane, and deform it. It doesn't work with everything, but hair is often a good candidate for this approach. What does your hair look like at the moment? (Not your hair, not the stuff you've probably been tearing out in clumps, but the modelled hair.)

I don't think you wnat your UV layout to be uniform and grid-like unless all the polys on the model are exactly the same. The UV layout and the variation you have in it, the waving and what not are a direct reflection of the variations in the size and shape of the polys in the model. if you take those irregular shapes and make them uniform you're going to create a ton of stretching in the texture when its applied, and that's gonna look bad.

You definately could do what Bob said about starting with a flat mesh, and shaping it after its been mapped, should work alright for hair, tho I think that'd get a little dodgy for anything thats anymore complicated, because if you do anything that alters the size or shape of the polys, you're gonna create stretching.

Anyway, hope this makes sense, I'm in the middle of UV'ing my latest project, and its only maybe my second or third time mucking about with UV's, and they're a pain all around.

This is the mesh as it looks now -- be kind, I know it needs a LOT of work!

With the exception of the bangs and short spirals near the hairline, every lock of hair on this is a 4 x Somethingorother plane.  There's probably under a dozen differently sized locks on the model.   (I was actually wishing I could make it more curly somehow, but it is looking like I will need a lot more practice before I'm able to accomplish that.)

Thank you guys so much for your feedback!  I've been sitting here and taking apart various sets of hair to see how they were made, and base this off of those findings, but there's so much to figure out!  I have a feeling I'm looking at an -awful- lot of pologons here, too, and I'm hoping once it's actually finished that I don't end up crashing Poser when I go to use it or anything.  Erg.

Attached Link: UV Mapper Forum

That looks good to me - granted, there is work to do, but now is a good time to sort out what that is. What UV mapping does the hair have at the moment? The ideal would be for each plane to have been separately planar mapped before the curls were added, but if that were the case you'd be home and dry instead of posting for help on this forum. ;) I'm no UV mapping expert, although there are plenty in the UV mapper forum, incidentally. Despite the name, it isn't just for UVMapper, they cover other programs too. However, I'm fairly sure that there is no way to get a useful map from this hair as it is in the picture. I think you'll need to deconstruct it somehow. Are the locks still individually selectable? I'd probably do something like this: select each lock in turn, straighten it out, and give it a planar map from the appropriate axis. Then apply the mapping from that resulting flat plane back onto the curly lock; in UVMapper you can do that by exporting UVS from the plane, and importing them onto the lock. If that's impossible or very difficult, it may be preferable to start again, but using pre-mapped planes to form your locks from.

For the strips, I'd be tempted to create and UV map a fresh plane of the same dimensions and then copy over the UV coordinates to an exported copy of the strip and re-import.
This should give much better results, and while still a fair amount of work, ought to be less than flattening the strips for mapping.