Day 180

Next is texturing but first I have to create the map for it. Above I've placed a checker pattern on the body and you can see how messy it is. Considering how jumbled the map is on the right, that isn't too surprising.

Just to start out with, I made a new map that just a frontal projection. This isn't a final solution since there is overlap between the front and back of the model.

So I made a cut around the neck and detached the head. I split that in half and now I can see the mouth cavity when I move the two halves apart. I moved the cavity away and then reattached the halves. I made new cuts from the corner of the mouth to the back of the neck. Now I can take these parts and unfold them. Unfolding involves Maya taking the overlapped map pieces and trying to flatten them. Above on the right, I have the top of the head, the chin and mouth cavity unfolded.

Next I detached the arms and then the hands. For the arms, I made another cut along the inside of the arm (so the seam is in a less prominent area) and unfolded the arm flat. For the hands, I re-mapped them by projecting from the top and then cut them to divide them into top and bottom halves. Then I did a similar thing for the legs and feet. 

For the body, I cut a seam down the back and under the crotch. I unfolded the whole thing to get what you see above on the left. The smaller part next to it is the unfolded tail. For the mouth parts, I took new maps from the top and then unfolded them slightly. This centered the crooked teeth so there was no overlap. I also unfolded the tongue.

Finally I rearranged all the parts for the final map. I took the chin and leg pieces and reattached them to the main body piece. If I wanted to be really efficient, I would have overlapped the right and left pieces of the arms, hands, and feet since these parts are mirror images of each other. If I overlap them, then the texture will just get applied to both parts. But the book didn't tell me to do that so I didn't.