Editing UV's for Poly's

[Jhonus]

Just practice and play around with it. Read everything you can find in the help manuals and in any books.

if you can't afford books, just go to a bookstore and read the chapter on UV editing :)

Tell me specifically what you want to do and maybe i can help out?

[Grooveholmes]

I hate to admit it but I'm really rusty with tha polygons in maya, Since i made the transition from Max to Maya over a year and a half ago I've mainly used Nurbs and Subd's.

What i need to do is pretty simple actually. We're not talking about a whole character or anything. I just need to texture a box with beveled edges with no stretching in the texture. Is that so hard?

Ahhh, I'm sure this is right under my nose but how can I increase the quality of the image map in the uv editor window? That's possible right?


Thanks for any help.

[Jhonus]

Okay.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has an easier way to do this... but....

the way i do it:

do a planar projection on each face - use the settings "fit to best plane" and "keep image ratio".

the "keep image ratio" helps keep everything in proportion to each other - reducing stretching.

Then arrange and scale the UV's into the appropriate positions (so that it fits into the texture space and looks like an unfolded box.). Then use the Sew UV tool to join the adjoining edges.

then you do a UV snapshot and custom make your texture to the UV map.

ummm... hope that helps???

[Lyr]

That's pretty much what I do, except I use cyndrilical projections for some pieces, and camera projections for really tough spots. I also usually make projections larger than one face, usually as many as I can get away with. Then I scale the uv's to a proportion I like and sew them together, then I use layout UV's to fit them to the 0 to 1 texture space.

Grooveholms, not sure what you are asking, but have you tried unfiltering the image in the display window?

[Grooveholmes]

Ok, cool.. i'll have to wait until i get home tonight to try this out. Got to many otherthings to take care of here.

And, Is there a way to increase the quality of the image in the UV Texture Editor?

thx

[Jhonus]

what res is your image?

i've never had problems with image quality in the UV texture window.

try playing around with the display filters under the Image menu in the UV Texture Window.

[Grooveholmes]

512x1024

Well is just looks like crap, you can't really make anything out and there are sections that are all stretched out and distorted.

...Ack, i just noticed that the resolution is set too 200 in photoshop, i'm sure that's a factor.

[Jhonus]

has maya stretched the 512x1024 texture into a square?

are you using maya 3 or 4?

I think you need to use square textures for maya3 and i think its recommended for 4 (someone correct me on that?)

try making your texture 1024x1024 and just black out the extra space generated. that might fix it.

[Grooveholmes]

alright, got it all figured out now, uh.. for the most part.

I figured out why my image was so screwed up in the uv editor, i had my images set to projection on the shader instead of 'normal'
Projections are 'bad' as far as this goes apparently.



one more quick question.. can i save 'selection sets' of uv's or faces for easy retrieval while editing?

[Jhonus]

yep, its called a Quick Select Set.

You'll find it under one the main menus.... just make your selection and then find the "Create Quick Select Set" option

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.