Could someone please post a tutorial on how to make a flattened out UVmap of a four legged animal please? Specifically, what they are somehow able to do is make a planar Y Axis UV map of an animal with four legs flattened out and also stitched together to get a seamless texture. I see people doing this and I don't know how they are doing it. I've tried UVmapper,BodyPaint,DeepUV but I still can't duplicate this output. There is some trick I'm not finding on my own and I need to know exactly how people are making these. Thanks ScottA

Attached Link: http://www.quinlor.de/tutorials/

Don't have anything for a four legged animal, but may be you can get some use out of my pelt mapping tutorial for humaniud figures. It uses Wings3d, free but with very powerfull UV tools.

There is a very good UV mapping tutorial for DeepUv at: http://www.runtimedna.com The principles outlined in it will help you with your map. This is something DeepUv handles well.

Dominique Digital Cats Media

Thanks for the links but they aren't specific enough to help me. They don't really address the problems specific to mapping a Z axis body with Y axis legs attached like in the example image. It must be something so simple that I'm missing it. Everything I read never works the same way when I try it. I think I really need an animal specific tutorial.

You don't use a single projection on the entire figure. Instead, you map the body in sections, using whatever method works best for each part. Map the torso as one unit, using cylindrical mapping along the z-axis. Map each of the legs separately with a cylindrical y-axis orientation. Then stitch the pieces together by hand. Minimizing distortion as you play connect-the-vertices can be challenging, and often it can't be avoided.

In DeepUv, I would first planar map the beastie in the x axis ( assuming he is facing the z ), then I would lift the top part of the mesh so you have two halves. I would take one half, flip it and rotate so the spines are aligned together. Then I would select the vertices along the head and spine, do a join relax the mesh, tweak etc.... There is no magic bullet solution here. It's on a case by case basis, depending on the shape of the animal, you may have to detach the head vertices in DeepUv and relax them separately, and then stitch them back etc...all the while keeping an eye on the checkered model to look at distorsion areas.

Dominique Digital Cats Media

It's just not working for me. Stitching separately mapped parts together would take me forever because I have hundreds of point to line up after remapping the legs and flattening them. Plus I have no idea where to stitch them to once they and the body are altered. There is no way I could stitch each point by hand. There are hundres of points in one area alone. I'd leave them in separate parts but then I get horrible seams if I do that. There has to be something I'm not doing right. When I use the relax function in DeepUV the mesh explodes off of the map. And the the other "advanced" relax options don't relax enough to make it as flat as I need. I'm obviously missing something. And I need a step by step tutorial badly. I can't find any tutorials on this specific type of model. And there aren't any UV mapping books at my local book stores. It's driving me crazy. The Poser horse is a good example model of trying to map a Z Axis body to four Y Axis legs.

NOte that when stitching, you can stitch multiple points together at once. If you have both UV mapper and Deep UV, it's a back and forth process there. as for the "exploding" mesh, remember that Deep UV can't handle poly separations of under 0.01, or irregular polys*. So first, make sure its all quads or tris. Second, enlarge it. 10000 percent if you have to (and some really detailed stuff in figures sometimes needs it). Get all the parts roughly mapped first. Maybe you don't let DUV finish a full relax, just enough to let you snag loose polys and such. Then lay them out close but not touching each other and get them sized so that they are all of similar scale. once they are close and in position, in UVmapper, just select all the points in a particular area. For example, the points on leg 1 where they would join to the body. Then select the matching points and stitch. often, a sub-d modeler will do the rough map on a low res version, and then "clean up" after smoothing. This makes the layout and mapping much faster and easier, as well. Part of the reason that "step by step" tutes for mapping are so hard to come by is that there's really no best way to map things. Another part is that so much of it is a subjective decision at the moment of working. And, of course, there's the fact that mapping a horse is completely different from mapping a cat, or a giraffe. THere is no one size fits all mapping methods. IT's all trial and error. You try something; if it doesn't work, you go back and try something else. It's not uncommon for some people to spend more time mapping an object than they did modelling it. Given the amount of money you've spent to try and figure out how to map well, keep hammering, keep asking questions, and don't surrender. A light will dawn suddenly, and you'll be off to the races...

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

Thanks for the tip about resizing. I've tried scaling up but it doesn't help in most cases. The UVmaps that CL makes for their animals like in the image I posted seems to be created by the same method all of the time. I really, really, really need to know exactly how they go about making such flat one piece maps out of animals with legs going at right angles from their bodies. I would love some sort of detailed image based explaination from CL on how they pull of this miracle. -ScottA