UVW Mapping Part I

With the head, neck and face modeled I now had to concentrate on bringing it to life with texture.
I deleted the 'Smooth' and 'Turbosmooth' modifiers from my object so I only had my editable poly object and the symmetry modifier. I applied a unwrap UVW modifier under the symmetry modifier.
Within the unwrap UVW modifier sub object selection I chose 'Face' so I can select polygons on my object. I unchecked 'Ignore Backfacing' and changed the marquee mode to paint. I painted the whole right side of my head and face apart from the ear, which will be handled separately.

Under the map parameters I selected Cylindrical and chose 'Align Y' to align the gizmo the right way up. Then scaled the gizmo to fit the whole head in, after that I moved the gizmo over to the right slightly so it was roughly in the middle. The reason for making sure its in the middle is because a green line will follow the outline of the object and if the gizmo isn't centred additional green lines creep up in other parts of the face which will cause problems.

Now clicking off Cylindrical mode to hide the gizmo, I then opened the material editor and set up a chequered pattern to apply as a texture to my object. The idea is to try and get each of the squares on the texture to be square and not stretched. I set the tiling to 35 points each to get small accurate squares on my chequered texture.

On the right hand side, under parameters I clicked 'Edit' to bring up the edit uvw map box.
I clicked face mode and select element under the selection mode options, then I clicked on the map of my face to select it. I clicked another option called 'Filter Selected Faces' which will hide everything that isnt selected, such as the ear. Under 'Options' at the bottom I turned tile bitmap off and turned constant update on. This means whatever I do on the edit uvw screen is done on the actual object in real time.

The next thing I had to do was fix any inverted and overlapping points on my object. I scaled and moved the map so it fit within the chequered box background. Then I selected the points at the top of the head and used the 'Relax Tool' under Tools. When the dialogue box appears the default options are all fine, so I clicked apply to then relax the points I selected. This smooths out any overlapping or inverted points.

After spending time using the relax tool on the head and face areas to smooth out a lot of the polygons, I selected the points which make up the eye area and used the relax tool again. This time on the dialogue box I changed 'Relax by Edge Angles' to 'Relax by Centres', this relaxes the points in slightly different way which is much better for doing circular areas such as the eye and nose which can be particularly difficult because of the overlapping points.
I also went over and made sure any polygons that were looking too much like triangles were tweaked back into a quad shape. This helps when applying the textures later on.

The next step is to apply the same methods to the ear, then render out the face map to import into Photoshop.