Head unwrapping and retopology

Work is continuing at a steady pace, this week I have focused on the retopology of the head mesh, and getting basic textures on it for the alpha presentation.  I have come across a few small problems, which have been rectified in a somewhat makeshift way. The main one is to do with unwrapping heads, this process can be done very easily by simply drawing a seam in Roadkill and letting it works it magic. However, I find the resulting unwrap is useable, but the texture space is not actually used to its fullest, and the distribution of UV's although pretty even, is not ideal. The way I see it, the best way to layout a head would be to have the face taking up a proportionately larger space than the normally do, and the face should have as little stretching on it as possible. I am going to talk to my tutors about this and see if they can offer any tips on how to best layout a head unwrap.

Here is a screenshot of the heads UV sheet at the moment, this will be changed after alpha, but at the moment it will do.

The next thing was the texturing, as this is a model of Steve Buscemi's head, It needs landmark parts of his face in the texture. This is very hard to do without being able to magically travel back in time to the set of the film and take reference images of him. The way I plan to tackle this is to work with a few different techniques. Firstly, I am going to put together a poly painted version of the texture, this will be a good starting point for colours and shading, I will then overlay some real skin and hair textures, and finally put AO passes onto the texture, hopefully these techniques together will give me something that resembles Steve Buscemi, without actually having any pictures to take textures from.

For the Alpha, I have thrown together a relatively quick poly paint, and projected some skin detail, this will not be the final texture. The normal maps and AO passes still have some artifacts, but I don't think its worth fixing this as they will be reprojected when I re-unwrap this at a later date anyway.

This Tuesday we have our Alpha presentation, for that date, I will hopefully have 2 posed characters, and have sorted a good lighting setup in UDK.