Ok i really like the modling part .. i despise grouping and I must admit now that my mad uvmapping skillz are like a 2 month old playing xbox .. I can't uv map the hauberk, the coif, or the shoulder pads with out getting nasty stretching and wierd anomolies ... Then again i'm just doing basic planar mapping so i can show you my problems .. but trying to map this any other way I can think of inclusing splitting off the arms and such just aren't working. I've been stuck at uv mapping for over a week now and to be honest i'm making no progress at all..

as you can see the front looks relatively ok .. but the sides and the sides of the breasts go insane .. as do the seams for the arms ...

That's standard for planar mapping ... To explain, think of a deck of cards that has a design printed on the back of the deck. The card is a flat plane. When you stack all of the cards up in a pile, the design on the back sort of repeats along the sides ... That is what is happening with your planar mapping. The plane is only a cross section that repeats from front to back, so you notice stretching on faces that don't lie along the same plane as the front. If you are using UV Mapper Pro, you can spread the outer edges of the model, and then relax the UV's so that they smooth out a bit. I think there are some tutorials on UV Mapper's site, or in the UV Mapper forum here.

well the pro is just a demo to show you what i'm getting (it's easier to screen capture. Unfortunately i'm stuck with uvmapper ameture (free) version .. I do free stuff items.

Attached Link: http://www.wings3d.com

as much as i wouldn't mind learning wings .. wings and i don't get along. My pc hates it for some reason my maching slows to a crawl and i'm running a p4 3 gig with 512 megs of ram .. it just doesn't like the program

Spherical mapping might work better, or cylindrical.

Attached Link: http://files.seriouszone.com/download.php?fileid=198

Message edited on: 02/16/2006 18:45

thank you I'll check into it hopefully it will help

thanks..I forgot Lithunwrap..;)

for those of you who know lithunwrap ... any idea why it's finding 500+ groups in an obj with head, neck and chest?

Map it the way a real set of clothes would be on a pattern. Sleeves are separated, by groups if you have them or just drag the select tool, and everything is mapped cylindrically.

Can you post a screen shot of the Lith Unwrap screen that shows all the groups?

i'll try tommorow if i can get it to open usually theres "too many groups"

There's also Blender, which has LSCM unwrapping. This method is similar to the one used to map the generation 3 Mil figures. Get Blender here, then read this tutorial or watchthis one :)

blender looks cool .. maybe this will do what i need. gonna play with it and find out.

The sleeves definitely need to be mapped separately using the cylindrical option. The rest might map box option better than planar option. You could then take the pieces of the box map and piece them together like a pelt map to get your seams to come out better.