UV's on Multiple Objects

Rampage

Alright, so I am a bit of a noob when it comes to texturing objects in Maya (v. 2013). I have laboriously built a low-poly robot and used about 30 or so individual objects to do it. I UV'd each object separately (i.e. : hand is one object, shoulder is one, torso is one) so I have about 30 or so UV sets and I want to consolidate all these UV's on to one set. I have no idea how to go about this, and I am certain there must be a way. Simply trying to copy UV's seems to do nothing. Can someone please point me in the right direction? :poly121:

Any help would be much appreciated!

passerby

simply select all the objects, and open the uv editor, and move the shells around so it all fits togeather.

Scruples

One mesh cannot contain another meshes UV's because it has no geometry to reference it to. Not to worry though because combining the meshes which will automatically overlay all the combined UV's ontop eachother.

Before you do that though it's probably a good idea to decide which parts will use the same texture sheet and only combine those with each-other (which could be your entire robot if you are using only one texture, and you can always add new UV sets later for multitexturing).

Edit: ^ and what Passerby said, may be better to not combine so parts are easier to animate.

passerby

ya you don't need to combine if you don't want, just selecting it all or just the objects that are supposed to be on one texture sheet will display them all in the uv editor at the same time, and than you can just make materials and assign them to parts that all use the same texture sheet.

also @ scruples, UVsets and material ID's are completely different beasts, in your post i believe your wanting material id's not uv sets.

Rampage

Yeah, I wouldn't want to combine everything because it would be one big block, unable to be animated. So there is no problem with using the same texture for multiple objects all on different UV sets?

passerby

ya no problem with that, just assign the same material and texture to all the objects, you really olny need to mess with uv sets in casses where a object needs 2 uv layouts such as one for it;s textures and one for lightmaps.

in your case 1 uv set per object, and one material for all objects.

Rampage

I think I have a handle on it now. Thanks for the help!