any quick lil tuts for relearnin maya's uv mappin?

flaagan

Long story short, need to get re-educated on maya's setup for applyin textures / uv mapping models. Been long enough since I last had to use the app that I'm pretty much drivin blind at it. (Somethin extra that'd be useful to know is multiple materials for one model, like a texture for plane A and a seperate one with seperate uv's for plane . Thanks guys.

Tulkamir

Dunno any tutorials off hand, sorry, but I can answer the multiple materials. Just select the faces you want to put a material on, then in the hypershade middle click and drag the material node you want to apply to them. You can put as many materials on one mesh as you'd like that way.

[edit]Oh, and if you don't want your uv's overlapping one another just put the different uv sets onto the different quadrants in the uv editor. To view the texture image in different quadrants in the editor go image>image range then select the quadrant using the right number. (ie: top right is 1,1 bottom left is -1,-1).[/edit]

[double edit]Also, for tutorials you might wanna look into the maya help. It's got some good stuff in there.

Other than that some basic stuff that I find useful. Cylinder mapping is godly. The select>select shell will select all the uv's connected to the selected. Very useful. The arrows on the top toolbar will align all the selected uv's to the farthest one in the direction of the arrow, if you have two edges you wanna connect in the uv editor don't do so with the uv's, just go to edge mode and select the edges and go to move and sew (the icon is the gizmo with the tape on the top), relax uv's is very nice. Automapping can be decent for simple objects.

mgrd

Best way to get good uv's in my opinion is do a planar map on the faces you want to map, keep in mind where the seams are gunna be. Then select the edges where you want the seam to be for the map itself, do cut UV's. then reselect the Uv's and do an unfold uv playing with the solver weighting setting until you get a layout that doesn't stretch(a setting of 0 tapers at the end, and 1 keeps things mostly even). Hope that helps.

BigL

I find using a two panel layout with perspective on the left and the UV texture editor on the right helps, whilst getting rid of the help line, Time slider, timeline and even top menu bar. Then I put the tools I will use on a new shelf including All the mapping methods, a delete history, and a paint selection tool button.

Of course to get to the main menu bar I then use the hotbox (spacebar).

My prefered way of doing things is to use cylindrical mapping wherever possible, and then adjust by view in the UV texture editor window. It helps if you apply a checker or even a text material to the object before hand so you know whether or not your UV's are backfacing.
After that I go around selecting odd faces either automatic mapping them or planar mapping them depending on the layout. Then I'm afraid its move by hand, unless you have Deep UV, which helps immensly.

el.

Zergxes

Have you tried Digital Tutor's free tuts?

I mostly combine planars and cylindricals. On higher poly stuff I use the paint selection tool like crazy, and sometimes I use the look throught camera option for the planar orientation.

Yeah, select shell in the uv editor is great. I find I have to tweak with the relax settings a bit in Maya before it works properly. I turn on the highlight uv borders thing to make sure I'm keeping seams in good places. Every now and then I use Maya's 3d paint tool to clone out seams. It leaves some nasty artifacts in the unused uv space, though (makes the flats look bad).

snap.crackle.pop

Hello flaagan, here's some page that helped me a lot when i was learning UVs under Maya (im still a newbie) but it was a lot of help watching some of the videos and playing with the scripts.

http://www.cheuk-lee.com/tutorial%20Site/EasyUVTutorial.htm

http://sunitparekh.com/pelting/