Maya - UV Multiple objects onto one texture sheet

robochrish

Hi Guys,
Sorry if this is covered elsewhere but I couldn't find anything.
I'm wondering what your guys' workflow is when it comes to having multiple objects on one texture sheet in Maya?

My example is that at the moment I am working on a sci-fi scene that has multiple wall segments. A Few of these wall segments have screens on them and I wanted to use one texture for the faces that will be screens.

I know that in 3DS Max i could just select multiple objects and apply an unwrap UVW to them all and that would be that, but I'm just not sure what the best method for doing it in Maya would be.

Sorry if I am overlooking something completely obvious, but I need to find the best method to do this.

Thanks guys

peanut™

"UV Multiple objects onto one texture sheet "

In Maya that would be Polygons > Mesh > Combine > Merge Uv Sets.option, that'll do it.

*(select all the objects you want merged and ... combine them)

robochrish

Thanks for the help Peanut, but I need to have multiple polygons one one sheet, not whole objects. Here is what I am working on and the purple parts all need to be on the same sheet:


As you can see it is 3 separate objects, but I need all of the purple faces to be on the same texture sheet. I can't just separate the faces and combine them, as I need to be able to export the 3 objects whole.

peanut™

Aaaah! in this case have a look at Transfer Attributes, you can surely check if your able to transfer the UV sets, if this doesn't work i may be wrong but there is a script called Poly UV Transfer at creative crash, im pretty sure this should help you out.

Link: http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/multiple-uv-transfer

antweiler

You can certainkly do your unwrapping with multiple objects selected. Automatic mapping doesnt account for multiple objects, but the layout UVs tool does. It can also scale your shells to the right size in worldspace. A good starting point for manual adjustment.

tharle

yeah, i dont think you need to do any fancy tricks here - just select all the objects you want to uv and then uv them. its worth remembering that you can use all uv space, so you might want to put the wall sections in the 0 - 1 space and then the monitor bits in the -1 - 0 or whatever.

antweiler

Oh. I didnt read, that you need a UV Layout for some faces, that are part of different meshes. Then Layout UVs will not help you, I suggest to extract and combine your faces, and somehow transfer or replicate your UVs on the original meshes, maybe copy/paste UVs in the UV Editor is helpful...

peanut™

"I need to have multiple polygons on one sheet, not whole objects.

I need all of the purple faces to be on the same texture sheet. I can't just separate the faces and combine them, as I need to be able to export the 3 objects whole."

Ant, he wont go for extract/combine method ... captivating morning. I wonder how this turns out.

robochrish

Hi Guys,
Thanks for the help. I ended up extracting the screens as you suggested, but I didn't combine them together, just had them all selected when I was editing the UV's. I them grouped the correct extracted screens to the correct wall segment so that they can be exported together.
Sorry if it seemed like I was being a bit simple haha, just wanted to see what sort of methods were available.

Thanks again ^_^