UH 7; Lesson 6; Texture Mapping

I figured this out myself but I want to explain for anyone else who doesn’t understand so they won’t have to go through what I did. Seems there isn’t enough content on this subject online or in the Maya help files. The Texturing process in Maya is NOT user friendly and I had to dig through tons of articles, tutorials and help files till finally I pieced it together. This probably isn’t the best method but it will get you the end results and at least point you in the right direction.

Texture mapping in Maya is done through UV sets. When you’re creating your model, moving polygons, extruding and getting the shape the way you want, Maya is automatically creating a UV set for you. Thing is, it’s useless! For your texture to map correctly you’ll have to re-create the UV set yourself.

Choose Polygon in the drop down for your shelf.

Right click your model and choose faces.

Select all and highlight the whole thing. -->edit > select all

Open up the UV Texture Editor. --> Edit Uvs > UV Texture Editor

You’ll see a bunch of orange geometry. Right click it and choose UV.

Make sure all the geometry is selected. It should be since you selected your entire model earlier. If not you can drag your mouse over it while holding down the left mouse button. Your mouse scroll wheel can be used to zoom out. Make sure you select ALL of it.

Choose Polygons and then delete UVs from the UV Texture Editor File menu. --> Polygons > Delete UVs

Now you’ll have to create your own UV’s to map with. To do this you’ll need to figure out what kind of mapping you’ll need to do. Your options are Planar, Cylindrical, Spherical or automatic. Since I was mapping the outside of a building with a brick texture I used Planar.

I highlighted all of the faces on the front of my building where I wanted the brick texture and then went to the Create Uvs menu and chose the box on the right of Planar Mapping. A window will open up with some options. I chose Best plane, Z Axis (because that’s where the front of my building coordinated to), Keep image w/h, insert projection before deformers. < -- DO NOT CHECK “CREATE A NEW UV SET”!

Click Project. Now you have all the mappings for the faces you selected on your model.

I had already set up a Lambert object that referenced my brick texture file so all I had to do was open the Hypershade window, right click the shader and choose “apply to selection”. Make sure you press 6 on your keyboard when in the viewport to see your textures on your model.

In the UV Texture Editor window you can move the mappings around and scale them till you get the desired look. Once you’re done with that, select all the UVs and move them to the side in the UVs Texture Editor window.

Repeat the process for the other texture mappings.