I'll just say this right now. I absolutely hate doing UV layout. It's tedious, boring, and quite frankly downright frustrating at times. However, I understand the importance. Thankfully, I'm a stickler when it comes to good topology, so usually my UV layout is as painless as humanly possible.
After manually retopologizing most of my mesh, I starting bringing it back into Maya for further optimization and refinement. I used Z-Brush's downloadable add-on Decimation Master to automatically generate some low-poly meshes for a few of the smaller pieces in my model, to save time. It worked well enough, but the topology was generally random. This made skinning more difficult than if I had done them manually. Luckily, the pieces I decimated were small enough to go relatively unnoticed.
Katon showed us a neat trick for saving UV space by duplicating and mirroring pieces that would be the same on either side. I'm still slightly perplexed as to how this exactly works in the computer, but sure enough it does. Any place where there was asymmetry needed to have its own UV layout, but generally speaking this saved a ton of room.
After arranging my UV's the way I wanted, I began generating Normal and AO maps via xNormal, a free downloadable software tool. Notice that I left quite a bit of space between pieces. That's because my intention is to add the UV's for Ezekiel (the Octopus character) and the Psychecept somewhere on my already laid out maps.
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| Normal Maps for the upper Torso. Image rendered at 2048x2048 |
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| AO (Ambient Occlusion) Maps. Rendered at 2048x2048 |
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