Copying/Transferring UVs as a NEW UV map in Maya 2017?

VickiVampiress · Apr 2017

One thing that has been bothering me forever is that if I model something and then duplicate the mesh multiple times in order to create a pattern for my model, I have to UV map each mesh separately, or replace them all with the unwrapped version later, which is a major pain in the behind for some models. It's just annoying in general.

I'm aware of the "Transfer Attributes" function in Maya, but unless I'm missing something, this is almost the same as overlapping UVs.

What I want is to copy or "transfer" the UVs of one object to another (identical) object as a NEW UV map, meaning that they won't overlap or "clone" so that I can texture them each independently the same way as if I were to unwrap the duplicate meshes manually.

Is this even possible? I can't find the information I need online, and I can't seem to find it here either!

antweiler · Apr 2017

Check the UV Set Editor, there you can created and remove UV Sets as desired. Just create an empty UV Set to transfer your UVs to. The Editor needs to be updated manually sometimes, one needs to be a bit careful with that

throttlekitty · Apr 2017

Can you give an example of what you're wanting to accomplish? I don't quite understand why overlapping is a problem in the way you explain it. You can apply a new material to each duplicate so each duplicate has its own texture, so you have a standardized unwrap but unique texture details.

VickiVampiress · Apr 2017

throttlekitty said:

You can apply a new material to each duplicate so each duplicate has its own texture, so you have a standardized unwrap but unique texture details.

Wouldn't that create additional texture sets though?

I've actually managed to work around it for this specific model, but the reason why I believe overlapping would be a problem is because that means the overlapping UVs will take the material of the parent object, which is what I don't want. What I want essentially, is to UV map a mesh, then copy that map across all my duplicates as new maps so that they're independent, as if I had unwrapped all of them one by one, or replaced them.

throttlekitty · Apr 2017

A model's UVs aren't linked to a texture by default in maya. You can link a UV set to a texture, but that's a whole other topic. I had to re-read a few times, I think I was getting hung up where you say map but mean coordinate.

Here's three scenarios, i've applied a different material to each row except the bottom. In this case I did my unwrap on the first piece before duplicating. The top row all share the same uv coordinates, middle and bottom rows I've manually moved each shell over.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/o8/z0skdxs649xx.jpg

But in a real world example with a ton of these objects, that would suck to do. Nightshade UV has a couple of nice layout schemes to automate this. In this case I don't care where each specifically ends up, so long as they aren't overlapping. Make sense, or am I way off base here?

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/ym/c5zwmekg903a.jpg

VickiVampiress · Apr 2017

I appreciate your input throttlekitty, but I believe it didn't come close to what I want. However, I've actually managed to resolve the problem. Apparently all I had to do was transfer the UVs, then delete history. It does exactly what I need, where the transferred UVs turn into a new map for that object within the same UV set.

Way to make myself feel like a dum-dum.

Copying/Transferring UVs as a NEW UV map in Maya 2017?

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