UV Unwrapping a Raptor

For the UV unwrapping tutorial, I decided to choose 3Ds Max since I felt comfortable with the process in Maya. After going through the videos, I learned that UV unwrapping in 3Ds Max is actually more automatic and easier than it is in Maya.

The process of unwrapping in Max is simple: you can choose from various different perspectives, such as planar, cylindrical, box, or spherical.

Inside the UV editor are tools that you can use. In this tutorial, the stitching tool was your best friend. It allowed you to select edges/seams and connect them with other UVs.

your best friend (along with the relax tool)

For the first step (unwrapping the tail), a cylindicral perspective was used.

With cylindrical unwrapping, a rounded object's UVs are spread out in a line, and are separated by a seam. For the tail, the bottom was used as the seam, since it is less visible.

After that, pressing the "relax" button in the UV editor was all that was needed to make it presentable.

After the tail came the body, which was slightly more complex. For the body, you had to select the loops around the neck and limbs (as well as one at the very bottom), and create the seams artificially (which was done by simply pressing a 'create seams' button in the UV unwrapping panel).

the blue lines are the seams

after that, you just peeled the UV with the peel mode button:

this is also where you create the seams

Though, unlike with what happened in the tutorial, my bottom seam was not as neat as the instuctor's:

I'm not sure why this happened, but it can be easily fixed within the UV editor by manually manipulating the UV vertices/edges. I would experience this problem with the other parts of my model's body, unfortunately.

The process for unwrapping the legs, feet, claws, arms, neck, and even head were very similar.

The peel tool was used for both the arms and the legs.

the arms before being peeled

the arms' UVs after being peeled. They were stitched and relaxed after this

The process had additional steps though, such as the fact that the peeling of the legs and arms around their seams separated some UV faces. This was fixed by manually stitching and merging them back together.

the legs after being stitched together and relaxed

But for the most part, the program did the unwrapping for me, which was nice.

The neck was a simple matter of creating a seam down the middle, selecting one side, and doing planar projection to unwrap it. The two sides were then joined together through the stitching method.

The face, eyes, and tongue were done in the exact same way.

The feet and hands were slightly more challenging to do, but they worked in essentially the same way as the neck and head. Instead of using box selection though to select only one side, you had to select all the faces manually, and then planar projected them.

When you were done, you should have had something looking like this:

All that is left to do is to resize all the UVs and fit them together in the UV map, which is something that I have already been taught to do in the Maya well tutorial.

In all honesty, I prefer 3Ds Max for unwrapping over Maya. As I said earlier, the program does most of the work for you, which is far different than Maya. It's automatic, easy to use, and, if there are any errors, easily fixed.