before you scroll down to take a look at the page, keep in mind that its mostly just little tips and explainations. the actual procedure is only a few minutes long ( mostly consisting of a few magnet moves )

We will now unfold the model. reason why i chose to do this now and not at the end is because we already have our model setup for unfolding, the model is a lot cleaner, and does not contain any smaller details that will get in the way or break out clean seam. Once we have finished unfolding, we can then we can go back to modeling, put in any neccessary details, use the old morph state and update it with the new details.

First thing we must do is define what the front and back sides will be, as well as the mouth interior. first. press x ( or alt+x ) to get you into a side view. To select the faces a little quicker we will probably want to do a lasso selection, so press and hold the "alt + ctrl + left click" buttons and draw your lasso selection. this will project a selection through the model, if you want to only select the elements that its normals are facing forward, press and hold "alt + left click". For now use the ctrl+alt+[L] though. ( ill explain why in a bit ). its hard to make a perfect selection, so if you need to fine tune your selection go ahead and add the faces individually, or unselect the unwanted elements. Now you got those back faces selected, get into the context menu, left click on "add to parts", click on "make new part" and give it a name. do the same for the front of the head, and the interior faces of the mouth. do not worry about the cross section/mirror face, because once we finish and mirror our model that face will be gone.

Geometry Graph: Take a look at the Geometry Graph Editor. Where you have your object, you should see a plus sign. If you click on that plus sign you should see the sub data for the model. things like the parts of the model, or selections that you have saved ( in most apps its named clusters ). The eye icon controls the visibility of the object or part. so if you left click on, lets say the front face, everything will dissapear except the front. but once you click on the mouth visibility, it wil add it to the face selection. the green icon in the middle controls sensitivity. so you can make things impossible to select. the last icon controls wireframe and shade. useful for templates, or when your models are becoming complex, its better to keep most objects in wireframe except the one your working on. you can use your context menu from inside here as well.

For example, if you click on the Cube text and right click on it you get a menu with a number of options. You can select a number of objects/elements as well. try this. click on cube, then shift+ left click on mouth, right click and choose rename, this will bring up a menu for renaming multiple objects/sub elements.

If your scene gets complex but you only want to see the object that your working on, you can right click on the plus sign to focus the geometry graph to that object.( you can get back by clicking on the dropdown menu and browsing to the top of the scene )

The Jaw and Seam that you see there are just saved selections. the Seam being an edge selection and the Jaw a Vertex selection. ( a current limitation is that if you want to select the saved selection in the viewer, you have to select an actual element that is somewhere inside the selection, you then bring up the menu, click on part, and choose which part you want to select. )

Magnets, Unfolding, Displacements

Before we Unfold, there is a few things we should do. first is to enable surface falloff and not global. ( Fall off occurs accross the surface and doesnt affect any neighbouring geometry that arent on the path of the falloff ) make sure you have nothing selected, press ctrl+right click to bring up the options menu, choose settings and change the Magnet Falloff Function to "Straight" and the Magnet Distance Route to "Surface".

Next, is to Tell Mirai the default shape that we will use for initialization. Go into Body Mode. left click on "Make State". and name the state to initialize.

The ear will be flat out as it is, very little change will happen to it. so before we do a magnet move to the seam, lets pick the ear. remember that whatever we have selected will not stretch when we do a matnet operation. instead, only elements that lie between the current selection and the falloff point will be stretched. ( though if you want, you can switch from surface falloff to midpoint of selection falloff so that everything including your selection stretches during magnet operations.) once you have the ear and seam selected, bring up the menu. press alt+Middle click on move axis to get into the translation options, pick "X" and then choose the mouth as a falloff point. move just a little and confirm.

Keep your current selection, and do another magnet move, but this time make the falloff a little larger. so pick a vertex at the base of the model. Translate a little bit and confirm.

Since we are trying to unwrap/flatten out the head, you should be checking how it looks from the front view every now and then. for my model here, when i looked at teh front i noticed that the part under the ear, and between the jaw was vey much hidden from the front view. so i selected a ver verticies there, tehn pressed Z to aim at the model from the front. and finally did a screen relative magnet translation ( alt+ middle click on "move" ). i chose the falloff fairly close by. i repeated that for the top of the ear as well. and for the jaw..i moved it inward on X a little so i can show some parts that are underneath it. go into Front view, press 2. and edit the points until your happy.

after editing the points manually its always nice to smoothen out your editing session by lasso selecting a few points in an area, and then use tighten. ( but just a little )

Save your current Shape Displacement. to do this. Go into body mode, select the head and left click on "Make State". but instead of State( pose) , this time choose "Linear Displacement". Name it something like unfold or something.

A large part is already done. but the top of the head is still flat. so lets try this. First pick a vew verticies ontop of the head that are a part of the seam. and do a Magnet Move on Y+ ( and the falloff on the forehead.) but dont move too much. Keep the selection and bring up the menu, and we will do a scele from a point, with a magnet move. so press alt+ middle click, define the point that you will scale from ( choose the forehead, and pick the falloff at the same point or maybe a little further along. scale until you are satisfied, and confirm. then just go to tweak mode, edit anything that your not happy with. go back to menu mode and tighten some areas. ( eg. Nose, Collar bones )

Taking a look at the front view again i notice that there are still a number of angles on the geometry toward the camera which im not satisfied. the main area of concern here is the part connection of the Jaw/Neck. Lets fix this. Press Alt+X to go into side view. select the front part of the base of the model+ the neck area. do a magnet falloff on Y and choose the chin as a falloff. then select that neck/jaw part and use tighten a little.

we are pretty much set now. what we need to do is make the front of the head flat. just select a face anywhere on the front of the model, bring up the menu. choose part, and pick front of the head. convert the selection to vertex and use the Flatten command on the Z axis. ( pick any point on the model as a reference of where to stop. i usually just pick the tip of the nose. to update the Unfold morph what we will do is go into body mode, bring up the menu, and right click on "make state" this will let us overwrite the old morph that we had. but since it was a displacement and not a state... you will get a number of options when you overwrite. just leave those alone. they are mainly there to fix up any problems you might have done when initially creating the displacement. ( at this point i assume you havent made any mistakes ;)

The back of the head is pretty much done for us. notice how the unwrap is almost equal to the one on the front? the only thing to do is grab the seam that you defined and move it back to match the geometry on the back of the model. go into the back view ( alt+Z ) fix up whatever needs to be fixed up, and make a new displacement ( make state, linear displacement ) and name it unfold back. The next step will be to unwrap the mouth. so lets start with the mouth before it got the magnet treatment. so to initialize back to your original shape, middle click on displacement and choose initialize. look over at the geometry graph, and right click on the mouth parts visibility to hide everything except the mouth. ( actually left clicking does the same in this case but i like to keep things consistant. ) unfold the mouth, and save the "unfold mouth" displacement.

initialize your model to its original shape, and make everything visible again.