UVW Mapping Part II

To carry on where I left off earlier, the next step is the ear. Under the materials menu I turned off the chequered texture to see the head properly again. I selected faces inside the unwrap UVW sub selection and began painting the polygons that make up the ear. Any polygons that were selected by mistake can easily be unselected by Alt clicking.
I switched to the left hand view port, where I can see the ear more clearly and then on the right hand side under Map Parameters I chose 'Pelt' and aligned it to fit around the ear.

Below that there is an option called 'Point to Point Seam' where I clicked a point on the ear closed to the side of the head then clicked a point nearest the outside the lobe of the ear. A blue trace line is then generated.
Now I have to edit the pelt map, this is done by bring up the edit pelt map screen, very similar to the edit UVW map screen I used earlier for the face and head.
Around the ear a lot of red and blue lines all connected to each other, come out from the ear. This shows the directions in which the pelt map will pull the texture coordinates.

I used the scale tool to pull the lines out more so there's more room to see what's going on. I also rotated it so the lines are pulling in the right direction. Then on the dialogue box I clicked 'simulate pelt pulling' to see how the lines pull the object. I closed this screen now that the pelt pulling is done. Back on the normal view ports, with the chequered texture back on I can see how the pelt pulling has affected the texturing on the ear.

Now back inside the UVW map edit box, under map parameters, using the free form tool to select the ear and scale it right the way down so it can fit inside the chequered box by the map of the face and head.

I didn't put the ear over the side of the head because this would cause problems with overlapping points and such, besides the ear doesn't have to be in the exact location, putting it underneath the head and to the side is fine.

Next I closed the edit screen and back on the modifier panel I clicked the symmetry modifier which is the top most modifier applied. I then applied a second unwrap UVW modifier to the model. This means I can now modify both parts of the face within the edit UVW map parameters.
So back inside the edit screen again, with 'face mode' and 'select element' applied I then clicked on the face map until I selected the other side of the face, I could see which side was being selected within the view ports next to the edit menu. With the other side now selected, I clicked the mirror option at the top to copy and mirror the face map, I moved it across and lined it up so it makes a full face and head map.

I did this also with the ear. The ear was more tricky to select, the best way is to make sure your in face selection mode and just keep clicking until you see the opposite ear light up in red.

The next stage was to weld the left and the right hand side face maps together forming one big map. I did this by bringing the two maps together as close as possible without overlapping one another and then from the bottom of the chin up to the bottom of the mouth, bring the points together and welding them. Then from the top of the mouth right up past the nose and up to the forehead, welding the points together there as well.

Once that was done I changed the aspect ratio of the map. Under the options width and height I changed the width to 512 pixels, by 256 pixels in height. Giving the map a 2:1 aspect ratio.
Then I resized the map to fit it back inside the chequered box using the free form tool.

To render out the UVWMap template I had to go to 'Tools' at the top of the 'Edit UVWs' screen and go down to 'Render UVW Template'. This brings up a dialogue box with render settings such as aspect ratios, colour fills and visible or invisible edges.
As I changed my width and height ratios under the bitmap size options to a 2:1 aspect ratio I had to reflect this in the 'Render Uvs' aspect ratio setting. I changed it to width 2048 by height 1024.

Also by turning off 'Seam Edges' I can render out a clean white on back image.

When rendering out the UV maps of the face, you can see where mistakes with the topology have happening. The topology I did of my face was generally working as I had hoped and wasn't causing any issues aside from a couple mistakes at the side of the forehead area.
The obvious flaws within my topology were on the ear, where I had a numerous overlapping and inverted polygons. This was something I was not satisfied with, however the complex and organic shape of the ear meant that this was a problem that was going to be hard to avoid.