[MAYA] Are my UV maps ruined? What do I do? I need a little bit of help here please...

Turbopasta

Hey there. I've been trying to make a sort of run-down rustic looking house, and I wanted to have it consist mostly of wooden boards. I'm happy with the placement I've gotten, but my biggest problem is UV mapping everything now. 



Pic above is what I've got so far for the mesh. I want it to mainly consist of wooden boards like this. To save on texture size, I had the idea of, for the roof, UV mapping one plank correctly, and copying the UVs onto a new one and repeating so the same texture would be on each of them, and if it looked weird I thought I could slide the UVs around later and maybe that would fix it. Maybe it would, I don't know yet.



Here are what the UVs for the top part look like right now. The ones around the edges are similar, as are lots of other similar copied features. They are stacked properly, but way too big if I want to fit the entire building into a single texture, which I was planning on doing.



Here's what the UV maps look like for EVERYTHING on the mesh at once. Some of it isn't mapped properly or to scale yet, but most of it is. I moved some of them around temporarily just to try and organize where certain things went. 

I've got one big question here: What do I do to make sense of this mess now? Normally I would organize this by going into layout and having it arrange itself from there, but I don't know how to preserve UV shell stacks as they just rearrange themselves afterwards. Was there a smarter way that I could have done what I'm trying to do? I'm basically just feeling lost at this point and idk what to do. 

Obscura

You do nothing except normalizing their scale. Such uv map is totally fine for tiling textures.

Turbopasta

Obscura said:

You do nothing except normalizing their scale. Such uv map is totally fine for tiling textures.

so you're saying just do every separate material as a separate texture file? I'm not sure I understand. I can't bring the UV map from the 3rd pic I posted into photoshop and lay down textures because it's a complete mess. I can try to place every single overlapping texture set down manually, but that would take forever and I don't know of any ways that I can do that that are as quick as the Layout feature that just sets them down with a little bit of room between. Doing that messes up overlapping UVs for me though.

Obscura

Separated materials, yes. This way you gain better resolution as well. This is the normal approach fog bigger structures like buildings. You can also better reuse your textures. Imagine a bigger project, where there are 50 similar buildings. You don't want to texture all of them uniquely and eat up a bunch of video memory.  Just do tiling textures with some material ids.

Alex_J

The problem isn't as bad as you think, you are just suffering now because you didn't have a clear plan at the onset. You're going to have to do some work to sort things out which no doubt seems daunting, but it's a cool model so don't throw in the towel over a few extra hours of tedious fixing. Just take a break and continue tomorrow. I don't think there is a definitive right or wrong answer as to whether you should cram it all into one material or not, that really depends on the intended use of the object, but like obscura is saying, typically an environment prop would belong to a larger texture atlas that is shared by other assets. 

Now, going forward, this issue should serve as a reminder to keep modularity in mind from the onset. In planning your model, you'll consider things like, "what parts of my model will be repeated? Should I UV the initial repeating piece and then duplicate it over and over so that my UV's are set up from the start?"