APCG 493 Fall 2014 Week 6 10/3/14

     This week I UVed most of my tiger model's UVs again after learning more about the new features of Maya 2015 UVing from Frank and after looking at some more 2015 UVing feature tutorials. I changed the outside seam cut of the tiger's back legs and redirected the seam on the inside of the side back legs. The same procedure was redone again for the front legs and the seam cuts were redirected inward on the inside of the side front legs. I also rearranged, changed, and redirected the seam cuts for the body. Instead of four separate pieces for the body, I connected the butt, two side body, and back neck together with the main top backside of the body creating one main body skin UV.
     I also connected the tail pieces together and the spiked mace like club tail. For the head piece I had to break the UV head crest apart from the face and make it two separate piece; a front head crest piece and a back head crest piece. The face UV looked fine after most of the other separation and so I just had to cut a seam line under the mouth, chin, and forehead for the face. The new features in Maya 2015 had a great distortion feature to calculate texture stretching and compression which helped a lot. But Maya began to crash a lot on me when I tried to use the UV distortion on the body and legs. I may need to install the newer patches for Maya 2015 to fix this. My workaround for this problem was to use the checker tiles to check the UV stretching. I tried to connect a lot of the body parts together as much as possible to close the seam lines but some parts were necessary to be left alone as separate pieces due to the tiger's topology and geometry shapes.