Surfacing the professor's Tough Guy

The professor dove into the meat of the class last week.  He spent the class explaining unwrapping UVWs.  He also explained and demonstrated pelt mapping, just to show us how it works.  It doesn't seem to have any real advantages over mapping in a planar, cylindrical, spherical, etc. way.  This lesson was super-complicated.  I was following him through, about, the first half of the class.  After that I started to fall behind.  Once I started that downward slide it accelerated throughout the rest of the class.  By the time we were ready to leave I was totally lost.

Uh oh.

So, we got a model of a guy in a jacket and jeans.  We also got a JPEG of the guy's outfit and face all flattened out.  So far so good.  As I understand the process, we are to take each part of the model, display it's planar faces in the "Edit UVWs" window.

Something like this.

We then clean up the vertices and edges and make them, somewhat, fit the flattened out pictures of each item.  At this point my brain says, "a wizard walks into the room, waves a wand, and the images are properly wrapped around the model."  I say that because that's as far as my understanding of the subject has gotten.

Take a look at the "Edit UVWs" window on the right half of the screenshot below.  The irregular green box with the hole in the top is the flattened representation of the body of the model's jacket.  The picture of the model on the right shows a patchwork of the flattened out JPEG as it actually mapped onto the jacket.  What a horrid mess!!

It's worth noting here that, before I made this screenshot, I had gotten the jeans in the "Edit UVWs" window to match the JPEG image of the jeans.  Look at the leg of the model.  Another patchwork disaster.  What happened?  I don't know.


I collapsed the modifer stack, hoping that I could just hold onto what I'd done and start working on another piece of the model.  Maybe I'd have more luck with the jacket sleeve.  Collapsing that stack seemed to completely reset the "Edit UVWs" window.  All that work I did on the verts and edges for the jeans and jacket.  Lost!

And the mapping on the model is still a trainwreck.

I then went right into selecting all the faces on the sleeve.  I applied the UVW Modifier to the stack on top of "Unwrap UVW" which, itself, was on top of "Editable Poly".  Under "Parameters" I made the mapping "Cylindrical".  As I adjusted the size of the cylinder, I noticed that the map on the rest of the model was changing.  I hadn't even selected the rest of the model.  Why was it changing.  I don't know.

What the frak?

The "Edit UVWs" window for that step looks like so.

I can't seem to figure this stuff out no matter how hard I fight.  There are so many details he went over in class and I couldn't write fast enough to get them into my notes.  I tried reading the Help file's chapter on the UVWs Modifier.  It told me about the fantastical, magical things this tool can do but didn't give enough of the step-by-step visual instructions a right-brained artist like myself needs to figure out how to make it do these things.  To top it off, when it seems like I'm starting off correctly, the program throws away half an hour of work without even explaining why.

I don't know what to do, and class is only nine hours away.