Are The UV's Good Enough?

[Atom]

Hi All,

I have just completed a fairly robust python script for automatic walk and talk of MakeHuman characters in Houdini. I have reached the render point and I am having problems with the UVs that are generated out of MakeHuman. As I start to work with the image maps I find there is stretching and non-tiling areas.

The UVs seem a bit big, stretchy and non-tilable.

The coverage of the UVs seems kind of large. Is there anyway to add more UV density to the map? Consider the fingers or even face. The pixel area is so small that I have to paint in a very small area of the image map on what I consider to be the most important feature of the character.

I am just wondering if anyone has any tips to take this to the next level? I have not done a lot of UV work but I understand what they are. Does anyone know of a special tool to increase UV quality perhaps?

Are the UVs stored with some default model that could be edited directly? I am not sure how MakeHuman works at the code/asset level in regards to UV generation.

[jujube]

I know Daz has separate texture files for the face and body, so maybe an alternate UV layout is in order? Or something along those lines. Ideally a fix or alternate option added to makehuman itself, because I have also noticed the small area for painting faces.

[joepal]

Note that you can have a different UV layout on a proxy. And you could use the vanilla base mesh as a proxy (but do a different UV unwrap fistt). So if you need another UV layout, that's the first thing I'd try.

[jujube]

Actually, I think when I tried to use the bash mesh as a proxy (not for UV reasons), it gave me an error message about not being able to share vertices or weights or something and wouldn't compile.

(But then again, that was the 1.0 version of makeclothes, because I couldn't get blender to install the later versions due to addon conflicts, or something?)