Best UV Texture Mapping Practices

[deckerego]

Aight... I'm trying to work on a texture mapping tutorial (that's largely Blender-centric again) for thingmeshes. Right now I'm working on a somewhat asymmetrical human mesh, unwrapping the faces onto a test checkerboard texture, then moving/scaling edges and faces to remove stretch marks. I'm finding I'm doing lots of things trial and error - I'm sure some people have better skills than I to offer.

Anyone care to share your tips/tricks of making beautiful texture maps on top of animated meshes? I'll eventually post the results to the community site & add them to my obnoxiously long tutorial.

[dirkk]

Not exactly what you asked for, but have a look at this picture! It's from Ben Mathis' Website with a somewhat unsavory name :-). This website holds several models and very nice tutorials from this talented guy. All this is quite 3dsmax-centric but I think the techniques apply to Blender too.

[deckerego]

Oooh... that's a good one. Perfect.

Another tutorial I've been looking at is Basic UV Head Mapping by Matthew Carter. It's a bit too brief - Ben's are more extensive.

[dirkk]

I also somehow missed this Blender tutorial: Unwrapping Suzanne

[deckerego]

I missed that one too... that's pretty much just what I was looking for.

Thanks!

[Tony]

I also somehow missed this Blender tutorial: Unwrapping Suzanne

That link doesn't work, try this one http://download.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/x5840.html