maya-cutting up mesh before UV mapping?

[kgg]

Is there another way of mapping UVs in a polygon mesh to have more than one snapshot in the 0, 1 quadrant (so you can get maximum space for the head and special detail spots) without cutting the mesh into pieces with extract? Or is this the easiest way? Cutting up the mesh then recombining after mapping?

[laxman]

You could select certain faces and then apply a separate material to them, so you would have the UVs of the selected faces separate from the rest of the model, but you would have to have a different material for each section. As Far as I know, you can divide the UV the way you want.

[kgg]

I just discovered that you could apply a separate material to selected faces less than an hour ago!

:yes

[Dj Niine]

There is a technique i learned form a professional texture painter, his name is paul campion, you might be able to find him on the gnomonworkshop website! But what he did was he took the front, side, top, sides, of the render view and saved it out to and image, imported it into photoshop, Painted over the ortho renders , smoothing out the edges, and once he got all the textures painted from those ortho renders, he pasted them all on one big canvas, blending the edges to make one huge texture for the characters head and mapped it to the character in maya with the uv mapping tools...it was nice.....

[laxman]

so he made the UV based on the picture he made?

That sounds like a really good idea, instead of relying on eyeballing to determine if the texture is stretched, you can also use the picture you painted like an image plane in the UV editor.

I think i'll start doing that. Though I don't think i'll be painting the texture on top of the render, I prefer to have the textures void of light information, then render out an occulusion pass and composite it back on. But marking out the position of major features is a good idea.

[Broomy]

hi guys,

there is technique that i have started to use with UV sets. Very useful.

Select and map the parts of your object that you want to use 1 map for, then go to the Unwrap window and go to Polygons>Create Empty Uv Set Option box name the set and then create.

Then go to UV Sets drop down and pick the new uv set, whatever u named it.

Then select and map the other parts of your mesh.

Create a layered shader and connect the two texture maps, name the file nodes as well it will be much easier to locate in a moment,Apply it to your mesh.

Go to Relationship Editor>UV Linking>Texture Centric, Then on the left you should pick the second map, whatever you named it and on the right the Uv set of the second part of the mesh.

Render and you should see the two maps rendered and mapped onto the specific parts of the mesh :)

If you have more that 2 textures repeat the creattion of UV sets, mapping and linking

Hope that helps

Broomy

[laxman]

that pretty cool!:)

[Broomy]

Hi

also if you start using this technique more it is possible too overlay dirt/grime/cracks/scratches or any other details that are only required in specific areas onto you mesh

laters