Quote - pitklad: I'm sorry, but I believe with the tools we have these days, avoiding distortion is more important than avoiding seams. Here's my updated layout for the face, with the lips and ears re-attached and the back of the head separated, so that they can use different scales.

Perhaps, but you did say you'd like to see procedural shaders for her, right?

When you make a feature like the lips here split and rotate within the UV map, it becomes very difficult to describe things with math. If I want to make a series of fine cracks and ridges for the lips, I want to do it with a consistent U or V as the driver. Here you've made it so that each lip requires a different equation of a line to run the effect across the lips.

Worse, I'll never be able to make the effect span the seam seamlessly.

If you then embed this UV map in a larger one as I saw in an earlier posting, the math becomes even worse.

However, if you were to also supply a texture that converted UV coordinates into "You are k of N units from lip left corner to lip right corner" then I don't care what the UV layout is.

What I'm saying is that procedurally, I need to drive effects with simple lines and curves that go from 0 to 1, and have two dimensions that are at right angles (orthogonal). Anything more than that becomes really hard except in special cases.

Consider my procedural pore generator. It is basically generates tiny little worm-hole shapes randomly distributed, with a known minimum and maximum separation from each other.

If you have the nose area separated from the rest of the face, I cannot generate usable pores for that. Those at the edge will be cut off or perhaps right next to one on the other side of the edge.

On the other hand, I understand that a protrusion, if done without a cut and move, would cause UV density distortion. I saw that with my procedural pores. Those on the tip of the nose were bigger than anywhere else.

So now that I said all that, I don't have a solution. You can't fit 4 square inches of skin into the middle of the face that is only 1 square inch.

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