UV unwrapping

Below is the final head model before the textures are applied. I created some basic eyeballs out of spheres. When they were in place I moved the eyelid vertices so that they fitted around the eyes. I also modeled more of the neck.

Now to UV unwrap the head, this will allow the texture to flow correctly over the model. I added a checker material to the model and turned off symmetry. I added an unwrap UVW modifier under symmetry modifier and then in polygon selection mode and using paint selection tool selected the polygons for the head leaving the polygons for the ear as these will be unwrapped later.

I selected cylindrical and scaled the cylinder so the head fitted inside it and moved it so the centre was inline with the centre of the head. Next I exited cylindrical mode and then clicked edit to edit the UV map.

I clicked the filter selected faces button so that only the selected faces were shown. The UV map is messed up and needs to be spaced out so that it will flow correctly when applied to the model. I selected the vertices on the top of the head and then went to tools>relax and this brought up the relax dialogue.

In the relax diaglogue box I selected relax by edge angles and then clicked relax.

You can see that the vertices for the head have spread out making flow better. I did the same for the chin and neck.

Next I selected the vertices around the eye and then used relax, this time setting it to relax by edge centers instead.

This spread out the vertices so they were evenly spaced. I used the same on mouth and nose, then I moved and spaced vertices by hand to make sure they were well spaced and to make sure that they were all quads and none of the faces looked like triangles.

Using select inverted and select overlapping faces I could see which vertices needed to be moved so that no faces were overlapping or inverted.

I closed this and as you can see the checker texture flows better across the head with less stretching.

The head is now unwrapped, now it is time to unwrap the ear.