UnfoldingThis is something that I am not familiar with. I have done some modeling in my personal time and I had some knowledge how it goes but the mapping and texturing is something new. At first it was really confusing. I had no idea what exactly the tutorial is showing and how it should go. With a little bit of help from my lecturer to begin with, I started understanding what I had to do. At first I did everything with the Automatic Mapping tool in Maya which basically unfolds the object into pieces and I need to stitch them together and leave only the edges that I want to cut to be. It really took me a while to do it that way since I had no idea what exactly the other mapping tools are doing. Eventually I tried on different objects the other tools and thanks to a tutorial by James Tyler suggested by the group I got used to unfolding. During the time I've spent unfolding I managed to get quite fast with it which really helped with the time management.
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I used Spherical Mapping on the head which in the UV Texture Editor allowed me to cut the back, the ears out and a part of the sides of the head so that it is properly unfolded. I exported the PNG snapshot from it afterwards and continued with the other parts. Since I deleted most of the central part of the main body as it is not visible, the legs were easy to unfold. I also cut the bottom part of the so they basically looked like tube. The shoes were made as an instance one to the other. When I unfolded them I had to do just one of them and do the textures on just one of them too. Fortunately, this wasn't the case with the hands. When I cut the faces earlier I separated the objects, even though one part of the body was an instance of the other one. I had to unwrap both of them but that was a good outcome since I wanted different textures on them (I want a tattoo on the left hand). In the UV Editor I made sure that I will be able to paint the faces easily afterwards as I made most of them look squarish.
Simple Color Textures
Some of the objects like the zipper, the teeth and a few more I did with a simple blinn or lambert material since the were just one color. I played a little bit with the reflections and the colors on them look really good. Even the gums and the tongue which aren't visible are textured. For the top part of the zipper I added a little texture on the front like the one that is going to be a tattoo and that was the first texture that worked for the character.