Mesh unwrapping unevenly

I did manual retopology, but my mesh is unwrapping very oddly. My arm should be a semi-simple cylinder, and yet when I unwrap there are areas with a lot of stretching (green). I’m not overly concerned with the spots that are at least still vaguely square-like and distinct, but you can see a few areas where the shape gets really weird, or vertices will overlap other parts of the mesh. I’ve managed to tweak it (both on the mesh and in the UV) to improve the issue slightly, but there are some weird areas that are still green, or even yellow, and clearly elongated. Is there an easier way to fix or avoid this?

Edit just to express my frustration and explain why I’m thoroughly confused. I’ve finished marking seams and unwrapping the entire thing. The “complicated” bits, like the face, the ear, the manboobs and belly fat have unwrapped perfectly. The simple bits (the arms, legs - which especially confuse me as my legs are probably as close to a perfect cylinder as you’d get in a fleshy character model) have really weird distortions, and overlapping parts…

It is not too bad. There is always some stretching. It is transferring 3d to flat after all.

Sounds like you have been doing the right things to try to make it better.
You may be able to add a loop in some places giving more geometry to bend to fit.

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Okay, I’ll keep tweaking it then. I can get it looking half decent. But for the life of me I can’t figure out why it’s skewing certain parts so badly, or overlapping, when it should be the simplest part of the mesh :woman_facepalming: Then again… I worked with computers/tech for 5 years in my previous job and know that they very often don’t make any sense.

Yes very clever computers but not looking at anything like a human would.
Variation in diameter of a cylinder sets up distortion, it may just be that it is trying to cope with.

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I just wanted to update incase anyone had a similar issue, and is as nitpicky as me. When I got further in the tutorials and through the colour grid on my unwrap just to take a look, I found I was able to go through and edit the UV based on how crooked/squished the lines, text and faint grid looked in material preview mode. It’s very time consuming, and I don’t know how many people will be as nitpicky as me, but with the live preview, I’m able to greatly reduce visible distortion!

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