Parallel Pipeline Setup & UV Layout

As hard as it is to get back into the swing of things with the holidays only recently gone, I am attempting to focus on getting the preliminary setup done. And, if I use references for the rig and the planet, I can continue to update modeling and texturing for both as I'm animating, creating a sort of parallel pipeline where I can alternate which aspect I work on without affecting the others. Of course, this means some setup is required--i.e. laying out UVs, applying basic textures to make sure the look is basically what I want and some basic modeling to make sure the blend shapes don't ruin the skinning or the other facial blend shapes. So I've begun to do the UV layout for the planet, which is coming along, but is far more time consuming than I imagined...in addition to having to select all the outer faces of each piece to create one spherical projected UV map for the outer shell of the planet, I also have to have separate planar projections for each internal plane and layout all of these relative to each other within UV maps for each piece. Fortunately, my scripting knowledge has come in handy, so for the outer shell I created a Quick Select Set and wrote a two line code to add additional faces to the set:

{
string $x[] = `ls -sl`;
sets -edit -forceElement FacesSoFar $x;
};

This way I can create a Quick Select Set, and then select outer faces for each piece individually (with the others hidden) and add those faces to the set.
This makes it far easier to make sure no internal faces are in this set.

In total it has taken me two days to layout all the UVs for the planet pieces. Below is an image I created in photoshop, using UV snapshots of each piece and then I colored them relative to their original color (see post "Constructing the World" for photo of actual puzzle ball). Using a printout of this UV Layout I intend to draw in colored pencil the texture map for the planet. Instead of offsetting the image in photoshop and having to edit the edges to allow for tiling, I will fold the drawing and draw across the border to prevent seams.



I have also completed laying out UVs for the inside surfaces of all the pieces, however, it remains to be seen whether they will need some tweaking when I attempt to draw their images. Below are the UV maps for the six pieces.



As far as setting up referencing, I intend to use the animattic scene from my previs since it already has basic camera movement setup...However I will have to delete the rig and the planets because I need to import the new files I've worked on as reference. (I was hoping to just transfer UVs for the planets but the pieces had some extra faces that I hadn't noticed, which required some changes in geometry, so I will have to start over with that...oh well).