Thanks again, Dave. That's a great UV you got there! Normally the eye meshes need to be separated if you want to do animation such as eye rolling and eye fluttering (teeth mesh needs to be separate also). But for stills its ok.

I did 2 things yesterday :-

1. Watched the Essentials tutorials for ZBrush in the Pixologic Video Tutorials column from start to finish

2. Played around with UV-ing Chris O Donnell's head in ZBrush and Maya and Photoshop for about an hour (I got kids too!)

I think I'm beginning to get a grasp of UV-ing somone's head.

I'm going to have to put in many more hours in order to be competent.

I used a ready head mesh and tried to modify it to match Chris's head. I used both Maya and ZBrush. I converted the head to OBJ and imported it into ZBrush as a Tool for finer sculpting.

I elongated the black man's head so I scaled in the Y-axis. Then I made the upper head rounder, beefed up the cheeks, reduce lips size especially upper lip and finally, made the nose sharper. The finer details were done in ZBrush especially using the Simple, Nudge, Pinch and Smooth and Flatten brushes. I turned on x-axis symmetry in ZBrush. I had lots of photo references of Chris O Donnell front face but very few side face references.

I then imported it back into Maya. I tried to make a cylindrical UV of the head to export to Photoshop but failed. It already had a default UV but when viewed in the UV Texture Editor, the head seems to be broken up into many pieces - not the usual smooth UV like the one you posted above. I have another head mesh which I successfully cylindrical UV-'d. Don't know what's the problem with this one.

My next study will be to try and use Master Projection and ZMapper in ZBrush to try to texture Chris O Donnel's face in ZBrush instead of Maya. I know Pixologic's AUV tiled mapping is pretty accurate with good, sharp results. I also want to UV a lot of heads and build up my UV hands-on hours. I also need to learn to model heads from scratch (you know, Extrude, Merge, Split Polygon, Proxy and all that). Wow...so many things to do using one incredible software application!

Hope to post more of my work later, Dave.

Dave, if you've done (or know of) any work on how to do great explosions in Maya, please could you share it. :-)

Many thanks
Ezani