Quote - I was wondering who was going to finish the BH morph pack.  I've been looking forward to its release.  I love My Michelle.

About the UVs...if tate mapped this in Lightwave...well, LW is a great program and I love it.  But unless you use the FI (I think) UV mapping plug ins (and the ones I have work only with version 7.5), its UV mapping capabilities leave something to be desired.  Maybe they've improved in V11.  I don't know...I stopped upgrading at V10, got Silo, and now I use LW for stuff I can't do in Silo.

Anyone who has UVLayout is gonna be spoiled by the end of the first day of use...that program is so great.  Tate, if y'all could get your hands on a copy of that -- for service releases -- it would practically do the UV work for you.  :-)  I'm not sure how the textures that've been made so far for My Michelle would work with UV revision, however.  Guess they'd have to be updated.

And please, I'm not trying to start an argument with anyone and I am NOT criticizing tate's work!  No way, no how.  I remember when I UV mapped in LW though.  I thought I was doing ok until I got UVLayout. 

Still, My Michelle has great skin...she has a striking transluscent skin I've not seen on any other character.  Maybe that's due to shader work.  I don't know enough about that to make a judgment.  And she has fantastic potential, has come a long way since her release, and it looks like she's already becoming something of a standard.

Note:  Whew...that Xurge surely can model clothing!!!  Reckon he does tutorials?  :-)

I've been using UV Layout for about 4 years now and yeah, you're right about its UV tools. You may have noticed my screenshots from an earlier reply were from UV Layout.

Even so, it does leave some things to be desired. Ideally I'd like to have a cross between Headus UV Layout and Maya's UV Texture Editor. UV mapping in Lightwave is just pure agony, IMO, no matter what plugin you use, except for the simplest low poly objects. Lightwave is a great program, but Modeler is seriously behind the times and its OpenGL response is abysmal compared to most 3D programs nowadays, particularly with  wireframes views, such as what you have to work with when UV mapping.

Anyway, yeah the shader skin looks really quite good, and yaeah, that is a result of the shaders, not the textures.

However, obviously textures play a huge role in any figure's appearance and Michelle could look so much better with better UV mapping. Not just the relative size of the UVs, but also ther's a significant amount of distortion and even some overlapping, such as in the nostrils.

Sure you can use 8K textures to get more detail, but that can quickly eat up all your RAM if you're using several textures, plus diffuse value maps, displacement, bump, specularity and so on. This is exactly why professional mappers try to utilize the maximum texture space available - so as to not have to use massive textures just to be able to get the necessary detail.

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