UV mapping in maya.

You've just spent many hours modeling a great model in polygons and it's looking great, but one thing is still missing, textures. How do you add the same level of detail in your UV set that you just put in to your model?

model by Dave Komorowski for Wishtank Studios.

You could use the UV editor to edit all your UV's, but I've found it a lot easier to use all the modeling tools instead.

Start by duplicating your mesh and moving the duplicate out of the way so you can work on it.

What we are going to do is cut up the mesh and layout the polygons to how we want the UV's to be laid out and then simply add planar mapping to the whole mesh.

On the crab mesh I decided to start on the shell and split it up along a obvious seam in the shell. In component mode, select all the faces you want to make one section (top of the shell in my example) by either using the paint selection tool, the Lasso tool or the select tool (don't forget the Edit Polygons->Selection menus to grow the selection).

Once you have the faces selected for the first projection, use Edit Polygons->Extract making sure "Separate extracted faces" is turned off in the options. Move the faces in world space and move them up out of the way.

In the crab example, I also need to extract the eyes in the same way as above because they will not flatten out well with the mesh.

Next I need to flatten out the top shell so that a planar projection can be added. To do this I used the Edit Polygons->Selection menu and selected Propagation->Border in component mode. This means only the border vertex's will be selected when I select some vertex's from the crab shell.

Once the border vertex's are selected, I turned off Border selection and de-selected the eye sockets. In the top view scale out the selected vertex's.

Next use the Edit Polygons->Selection menu and grow the selection once. Scale these vertex's out a little and repeat this until you have a nice flat view of the shell in the top view.

To finish this part off, you could use the Average Polygon tool on the selected faces to smooth everything out make sure there are no vertex's on top of each other. I also added to the selection the vertex's around the eye socket to flatten them out a little while adding the polygon average. The last thing I did to the shell was to rotate the eye vertex's 90 degrees so they pointed up.

We now have a nice view from above of the top half of the shell that will work well for the UV's. Repeat the above steps for the rest of the mesh and you should end up with somthing like this. You can also add lattices to selected vertex's to help flatten out parts as well as any other deformation you like. It is safe to delete history as you work, because you don't need any connection back to the original mesh. The only thing you have to be careful of is that you can't change the vertex count from the original so you can not delete faces or add them.

Once you are happy with the mesh simply use the Edit Polygons->Texture->Planar Mapping to add a planar map from above.

The last thing to do is to transfer the new UV's to the old mesh. Select your cut up version and then shift select the original mesh. Use Polygons->Transfer and make sure the options are set to UV Sets only. As long as the vertex count is the same on both meshes (which it should be) this will transfer the UV's to the original mesh. After this, you do not need the cut up version anymore and you can safely delete it if you wish.




The crab model used in this tutorial was modeled by Dave Komorowski for a project by Wishtank Studios called Sara and the Starfish which I am presently working on.