Maya - Rubish in U.V. Editor

Irodex

Hey guys, I am new to Maya and am following one of the Gnomon video tutorials. When I open my U.V. editor for the first time, I get this rubish, which, what looks to me like a pre-layed out U.V. that Maya has put in. When I select certain lines in the editor it will select faces on my model.

Here is what it looks like :





If anyone can tell me how to clear that stuff, without deleting faces on my model, it would be greatly appriciated.


Thanks.

monster

You can just select all the faces in the perspective view and apply a planar or cylindrical mapping.

Irodex

Hm, when I do that it plops down a huge UV of my head..but thats not exactly what I want to do. Any other ideas?

vahl

apply several planar/cylindrical mappings on different parts of your mesh, then tweak them, moving uv points, stitching edges etc... or if you're very lazy, apply an automatic maping but it's shitty

SouL

If you want a clean area to work with, you have 2 options.

You can press F12, select all the UV points (in the viewport) and delete them. Check one of the menus in the UV editor... it should be there. This wipes out all of your UVs. But it'll display the polygons in your viewport in this white transparent garbage that makes things difficult to read.

So do this instead:

Press F12, select all your UV points in the viewport, open your UV editor and right click. Left clicking will make you lose your selection. Then simply scale everything down and move it off to another area in the editor.

The reason you get this garbage is because, by default, everything has UV coordinates layed out in Maya. So if you start off with a cube, Maya will already have it UV'd for you. But once you start adding edges and extruding faces from you cube, Maya will add the appropriate UV points, but the program doesn't arrange it for you.

cholden

some basic information in setting up UV's in Maya here

http://chrisholden.net/tutor/tutshelluv.htm

Also, if you want to get rid of that dot in the center of the polygons
window > settings/preference > preferences > Selection
In Polygon Selection, Select Faces with Whole Face

Irodex

Figured it out...it wasn't letting me delete the UV's becuase I wasn't in object mode..learning Maya is gunna be fun

Justin Meisse

huh? deleting UV's, what the heck????

thomasp

maya isn't context-sensitive, so better have an eye on the status field when something doesn't work as expected.

Justin Meisse

I usually just do an automap, move all the UVs off to the side in the UV viewer and then start laying out the UVs with planar and cylindrical maps.

The reason I do the automap is because it makes it easier to see when I miss a triangle by mistake and I can usually just grab the orphan triangle and move it where it needs to be

malcolm

Why the hell would you want to delete all the uv's? Just start unwrapping your model?
1. cylindrical map head, show boarder edge, line up your seam.
2. relax uv's 5x

3. finished.

Raven

The head mesh isn't very clean to begin with, that'll cause problems even doing the standard cylindrical mapping.

As the triangles aren't going to want to settle nicely, you want your head to flow following the main lines of the head/face.

I mean this will help sort everything out manually post a basic mapping.

Mapping is simple though, the link above is a good start. You won't have anything automatically done for you. What you want to do is start by mapping a section with a basic type: Sphere, Cylinder, Planner, Auto(Box) these are all quite access icons on the Polygon Shelf.

Once you've done that in the UV Mapper itself you can right-click and change between the selection mode (face, vertex, uv, etc.) make use of this. You also have at your disposal Cut and Sew for UV Vertices; these are extremely useful making sure surface line up correctly and you can move faces exactly how you want to.

There also some additional tools in the BonusTools Kits available on the Alias website for download (provided you have a Bronze account). Worth checking out as they help with some standardised mapping for characters and such.