Responsive:UV mapping

I am in charge of UV mapping and which is totally new to me. From the last project, we use toon for the colour of our pig characters therefore I did not have a chance to try UV mapping in any of my project so this time I carefully follow Mat's video guide, deforming the mesh step by step. The mesh was not created perfectly in terms of some collapse edges and a lot of extra edges left due to deleting unnecessary edges. One main part of UV mapping is to cut the mesh into parts and unfold them like sewing a teddy bear but it is extremely difficult with the messy edges therefore I told more time than I should, attempting to solve the problem as best as I can. I select different loop of edges instead of involving the messed up part in order to avoid confusion of mesh.

I was just able to get the UV map but that is not really perfectly extracted and it is something out of my hand. If we have more time, I would have redo the whole mesh to make sure organised edges in order to proceed. The mesh is very important to the rest of the production which is what I have learnt from working on the mesh made by someone else.

The complicated part is to colour the map. Since I fail to get a perfect map, I need to refer back to the area of the map in maya when colouring in photoshop. Luckily it did not take long to find out the area and quickly applied some texture material like felt fabric (below)

and denim texture, multiply the layer in photoshop so as to make them show on the mascot. I am very happy with the texture and there have been several trials of textures and colours. Here is the final UV map.

At first the mascot look very scary with no eye white and suspenders to its trousers. The blue is lighter and could not really see the details (especially in a black background). Greta suggests to add suspender and yellow stitching alongside the trousers, I also give it eye white and darken the denim.

I also tried different lighting and angles when experimenting. It cannot be too bright otherwise the details on the texture might gone and the same when too dark which is very difficult to mange the lighting.

Eventually I decided to use grey to export the image and edit in photoshop. It is very difficult to get stills from maya especially when we are in hurry. The quickest way is to edit lighting and colours and shadow in photoshop.

I regret spending too much time on unfolding the mesh and left with not enough time for the colouring and lighting which is as important as the modelling. We should have started the production a few days before and should not wait until the last few days to make the model. At this point, I really dont want to rebuild the UV map anymore therefore it is best to focus on the editing working in photoshop and fix the flaws while getting ready for the next part: apply photo background.