UV Mapping Question

K1NG W3NZEL

I'm new to modeling, just started using Maya a couple months ago. I recently kept up with the Darksiders II MAW Contest and was inspired to start a little side project creating an axe. I'm not sure how to ask my question. My axe is 3-sided, and I guess you could say tri-symmetrical. I want to know how you create UV's for one "side" so you can just paint/texture out one side of the 3-sided object then I guess mirror it around...? Max Davenport's ( http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=95374 ) submission will help visually describe what I'm talking about. If you look at his axe, it is 3-sided, but his diffuse, normals, etc. only have one of the 3 sides actually textured/ normaled/ etc. How do you do this? Because you can't just stack the UV's on top of each other correct?

poopipe

You can stack the uvs fine..

K1NG W3NZEL

Really? Someone told me that you couldn't do that because it's "overlapping" UVs which can cause problems with the normal. But I'll try it, hopefully it will work; thanks for the reply.

MooseCommander

Stacked normals are fine except for when you are baking out maps. When baking out maps, you should make a duplicate of the object and either move the stacked UVs out of the 0 to 1 space, or scale the stacked versions way down and put them into a small corner. Bake out your AO, normal map, etc. using the duplicated version and then use that normal map on the original version with stacked UVs.

poopipe

does maya allow you to shift UVs over by one unit yet? if it does you can just shift them over and leave them there.

K1NG W3NZEL

So something like this is ok? With the darker blue being 3 UVs stacked.