Making The UV’s: Bad UVing!

This is the first UV map I created for my character, yes I was lazy with the spikes and horns but as they are going to be just a near enough solid colour I thought a Planar map of them would be enough. However the major problem is the head, as you can see I was lazy with this as i was having problems. I Planar mapped it and split it into two UV’s to paint each side of the face. This is bad, mainly because as the texture reaches the top of the head it gets stretched because of the poor UV map.

Now to make sure my UV’s were ok before creating all my textures I tested my model with a few wood pictures off google. Here you can see the problems and thats why it is good to consistantly test your model, if its wrong go back. Especially with the rigging and UV’s its harder to go back once you have done it all. In the case of weights you have to redo them all!

Here is my pictures showing you the bad UV’s;

So to improve this I went back (yes it meant I had to undo my weights and hard work, I learned the hard way) and created this UV map.

As you can see the Head has a changed UV, I created this by splitting the UV and unfolding. The model now textures a lot better despite the UV map still not being the cleanest.