Hi Everyone,

This is the first time that I have tried to submit a question on a forum, so please forgive me if I don’t do something correctly. I will also try to give you as much info as I can. To start off with, I have 3 problems which are intertwined with one another. I just haven’t been able to resolve them given my skill level and knowledge of texturing, UV layout, layering textures, and UV sets. I hope I can explain this all correctly.

1) Laying out my UV shells so I can create a gridline pattern to generate a groove pattern in a granite material, such as slabs. The building's design doesn’t allow me to create a generic type of grid pattern that I can tile because the gridlines have to fall along some very specific spots. So the gridline pattern cannot be tiled along with the granite texture.

Unfortunately, I found out that the UV snapshot of the shells in the 0 to 1 UV Space create a discrepancy on where I should place my gridlines, mostly due to the variation in the size of the edge loops, which I found to be odd. I turned off “anti-aliasing lines” and tried various file formats to see if I could get a more accurate representation of the edge loops exact location on the shells, but with no luck. Therefore, the accuracy of the gridline’s placements still tends to be off.

2) This brings me to my second issue. How do I network my granite albedo texture file which requires tiling with a gridline specific pattern that doesn’t tile to my shader’s base color, bump/normal, specular, AO, and displacement file maps?

I generally create layers in Photoshop and place the gridlines over top of the base color and then make all my maps. But, since the granite will have to tile in the U- and V-axes and the gridline pattern will not tile, I need to be able to layer the texture and gridline pattern files in Maya some way.

I have tried to use the Layered Texture node with the albedo file and gridline file on the shader’s base color. I think the Layered Texture node will work if I can just get the gridlines to overlay correctly and figure out why my granite texture turns black even though I am using a .png file with transparency. The person that requested this model wants all image files to use the .png extension.

3) My last issue is sort of an extension of the first two problems. I need to layout my UVs in the 0 to 1 UV Space to maximize for resolution, especially with regards to the gridline pattern. If I stack the UV shells, I can increase the size of my UV shells. Thereby increasing my gridline’s resolution with less work on creating the gridline patterns itself, which should also increase the consistency of the line’s layout since all the stacked UV shells will be sharing the same gridlines.

The problem is how to layout the vertical corner segments. At this time, I have each vertical corner segment as one UV shell. Then again, given the height of the building and the height of the 0 to 1 UV Space, I don’t have much room to increase their shell size to maximize the use of the 0 to 1 UV Space properly without dividing the vertical corner columns into sections. But will splitting the vertical corner columns into sections and stacking them be okay? I mean I will have more visible seams, but maybe not. The seams will all fall where the gridline grooves are supposed to be. Yet again, this might be something as simply as setting up a separate UV set for the gridline patterns and breaking down the vertical corner columns only on that specific UV set so as to keep the Texel Density of the shells identical when I increase the shells size.

I really hope that I explained everything here properly. I also attached a couple of screenshots which might help add to my explanations of the issues I am having.

Thanks in advance,

Azlyn