UV Question

# 1 29-12-2013 , 05:16 PM

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Join Date: May 2006

Location: Williamson, WV

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I have a small project I'm working on at the moment. It's a house that me and my wife are building and I wanted to model and texture it in Maya before we started on it to get an idea of what it would look like. I'm using textures from the net for brick, stone, wood, siding, fabric, etc... I already have a bunch of materials in my hypershade because I am laying out the UVs for separate objects, for example... I have one for the washer/dryer, one for the tile in the bathroom, one for the dresser, one for this and one for that. By the time I am finished with this thing I will have a LOT of them! My question is... is this right? Or should I wait to texture the whole thing when I am done modeling and lay all the UVs out in one or two files? I do Maya for a hobby and am not sure what the standard way of doing this is. Also I realize that I need different materials for glass and more reflective surfaces and also ones that are not as reflective such as shingles and whatnot. Also, I don't really know how to use the bottom portion of my hypershade to graph these objects (inputs/outputs etc...) Do I need to bother with it? Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks

Sampson

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# 2 29-12-2013 , 06:27 PM

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Join Date: Feb 2004

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Having a UV tile for an entire object is pretty standard. Having a material for that object, or even multiple materials, is also very common. So yes, you will have a lot of materials if you have a lot of objects user added image

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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# 3 29-12-2013 , 07:15 PM

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Having a UV tile for an entire object is pretty standard. Having a material for that object, or even multiple materials, is also very common. So yes, you will have a lot of materials if you have a lot of objects

Originally Posted by NextDesign

OK but what I mean is, should I lay out all the UVs for everything (the shingles, fireplace, siding, PLUS all the assets inside like the faucets, fridge, washer/dryer, etc...) on one UV snapshot or is it common to have a bunch of separate ones.

Sampson

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# 4 29-12-2013 , 10:08 PM

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Join Date: Dec 2006

Location: South FL

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Combining a bunch of unrelated objects and stuffing their UVs into the 0 to 1 tile sounds messy and limiting. Considering camera angles and render resolution, having UVs set up like this means that all UV shells in that tile will take up only so much of any given texture resolution. A 2k texture containing a washer and dryer will mean less detail for both even if you managed to use every bit of that UV space. So yes, it's common to for an object to have it's own UV map.

As for materials, I don't bother with them when laying out UVs, well there are a few I use, some solid lamberts to mark what faces were projected and a textured lambert to test distortion. Other than that, material testing is a whole other process for me since the lighting conditions while UV mapping are unsuitable if not downright misleading so I have a swatch scene for that.

Also, I would say most definitely get familiar with Hypershade in the future user added image

. Creating some sweet shading networks aside, it allows you to work faster and make the most of the nodes.

Example : color/bump/spec maps for the same texture having their own 2D placement nodes that each have to be tweaked whenever the repeat values on one changes simply because the file textures were created with the map button in the attribute editor instead of taking 5 seconds of middle mouse dragging in Hypershade to connect all three files to the same 2D placement node.

Wow, that was a ramble lol.

- Genny
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# 5 30-12-2013 , 03:49 AM

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Join Date: Aug 2011

Location: Sliema Malta

Posts: 497

Here is a snap from our game image folder. We have about 6,500 objects and if you look in the bottom left we have about 1,600 textures made. Now subtract 400 from that for the source tiff files and you have all of our game tiled textures. So it can become a bit much after a while... I don't even have all of the material fx tiled sheets and the weapon and character textures in there. All told we are currently about 12,000 assets with sound, animations, characters, and models... YIKES

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