Thanks again Michael.

Trying the automapping technique. I've found it helpful to move UV's in pairs of 2 to somewhat maintain the scale, and as close as possible match adjacent edges before I move and sew.

Anyone wanna play jigsaw puzzle with me tomorrow? Let's stitch this up and get to the FUN part haha.
Enough UV's for one day. My head spins :p

Back from real life commitments and family.
Spent a good 14 hours whole day trying to get my head around UV's and more different mapping techniques and tools. I've done many types of projection methods of whole head as well as select areas. Automatic maped the head at least 4 times trying different move and sew plus relax techniques. It's slooowly sinking in, but the outcome, I still wish I had more control over. I mean I AM in control, just not doing the right things at the right time for the right reasons :D

Here's the best I can do with what I've learned so far. It's not ideal, and to be honest it's nowhere near as good as it needs to be. There's stretching and scale problems here and there. The throat and the area under the chin, are hellish to get minimal distortion in.
It's meeting two goals though.

1) The features (front) of the face face must remain undistorted and true to the geometry for easier handpainting, without any overlapping. Meaning if the throat distorts because of it, that's a compromise I am more than willing to make.

2) Everything is UV mapped and on one 512x512. Some areas are reusing/sharing the same texture space. Others are not.

Conclusion.
I need to read more and trial and error less next. I do need more practice doing this. Slow learner apparently :p

With the above two goals met I still need to learn how to maintain uniform scale AND use the 0,1 space to full efficiency.

I should have picked a much simpler model, but I really wanted to learn how to do humans, with hair and eyelashes using alpha masks :)
I've learned a lot about UV's, but not mastered it.

It's a little hard to see what's going on with the checkers but no need to post a gazillion screenshots :p

Awesome job with the UV map.

You said my UV's looked good, well it looks nowhere near as complicated as what you've had to do. Nice work indeed. The month's almost over and it still looks like you've got all the texturing to do now. That's going to be quite a challenge to finish in time but you can do it. I hope you finish in time but even if you don't, it looks like you've learned quite a bit which is mainly why I entered the comp, to learn and have fun.

You've done good so far AlphaFlyte! :)

yeah - keep at it AlphaFlyte - it looks like you're making some steady progress mate - you've got the hard stuff out the way - now you can have some fun painting on some colors!

Thanks lads,

Yes a challenge and a struggle it has been. It still is, but it's oh so rewarding once the UVs are done and you get to do all the fun paint stuff with accuracy and control. Things go exactly where you want them to appear and there are very few surprises hehe. It sort of unlocks the next level where all the fun stuff is.

A first paint and bump pass. Not feminine and retro enough but getting there. Next I will look into spec map hoping it will make her a little less plastic looking, and the alpha stuff for hair and eyelashes. Hehe yes the eyes are there under those HUGE sunglasses errr goggles. Some bump mistakes on the upper lip as well.

There are still a couple of surprises with how color reacts to light and spec via the blinn. It helps to work with a bit more saturation than I would normally choose if painting for instance to avoid muddyness and grey creeping in.
Hair came out looking like wood panels haha. I'm on it.

Forgot to attach image

A question for you UV afficionados. If the above UV map is my final (for this project. I'll do better next time).

What decissions would you have done differently?
What would you change?

Alpha masks are fun, but woaaah takes practice to get good results from. I naively thought it'd be cake walk, but sheesh was I wrong. I have nothing but respect for people who can make hair look good with just a few polycards and lots of alpha mask and paint trickery. If my guess is correct it will be more color variety and shades in the hair when I paint the spec map.

Getting quite a bit of matte lines, so I think I have to go in and clean near the UV edges and make sure something isn't either pure white or pure black.

Here's a first stab at it.

Very nice improvement! I recently went through a tutorial using an alpha map to create the bristles on a paint brush and thought that was a really cool method for getting certain results. Your texturing looks alot better now. Good idea for doing that.

I like the flowers on the hat; the style of the shapes gives me the impression that it is something to be worn to a beach, or to a park on a sunny day.

Only thing that gnaws at me is that the gray/blue color scheme reads as "drab" to me; perhaps a "sunnier," cheerier color scheme may liven it up a little, or perhaps just saturate or brighten the colors a tad...What is it you are going for, with the hat?

Couldn't agree with you more m8. It's one of those areas where I feel I have less control over the colourmap right now. Would you believe me if I say top and bottom of the hat is the exact same colour? :p I will look into it and see what's going on. Maybe it's lighting, or the bump. I'll try and think of a really sunny colour scheme to honour your trip to Spain :p

Can we see your UV layout :)

The final UV layout is the second post down on this page. This is what I'm painting on. I should have spent more time on the ear and on the hat, but I acted on the deadline of end of the month. Both could have used more cleverness especially with the band on the hat that I think would benefit from being as straight as possible UV wise. Live and learn.

So I've done some research and colourstudies today. I had this idea to move outside the colours I typically pick and like etc and decided to investigate what women want. Apparently they love Lavender *gasps in astonishment*

So after a bit of fiddling and splotching around with colours that were really uncomfortable working with we have this: