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Posts Tagged ‘ UV Mapping ’

UV Mapping II – “Craps Table”

By Brad Swardson on June 7, 2009

uvcrapstableIn this tutorial I am going to walk you through the process of laying out the UV’s and texturing a craps table. Yes this is a follow-up to our previous tutorial where we textured a simple and high resolution die. I thought it would be appropriate to link the tutorials so you can use them together in a scene.

This tutorial will be directed more as a step by step process of laying out the UV’s of our craps table. This is by no means the only way to do this, but just like everything else in Maya there are hundreds of ways to do the same thing. I am going to use different tools and toolsets to do this to give you a well rounded experience with the different tools you have available to you. In future projects you will be able to use what you learn here and adapt it for what you need.

So PAY ATTENTION to what you are doing! Don’t just follow it step by step and then forget what you have done.It will help in the future, I promise.

So, we have received our model from the modeler. How do we go about texturing it? Well, the first step should be gathering reference. Whether that is photos, diagrams, the actual object, the more you can get the better. Unfortunately we don’t have a craps table, so we will have to resort to Google for the images.

Here are some for you to familiarize yourself with them.

So, looking at these images we can get a descent idea of how things need to be laid out. We are going to need a material for the felt table, a light reddish wood material for the main outer and inner rim of the table, a leather texture and a darker wood texture for the underside and the legs.

Our goal here is not to re-create this specific craps table, but using it as a guide we can get a good idea of how to texture our table to look good.

For this tutorial we have some milestones we need to hit in order to call this project complete.

Here they are:

  1. Acquire our model
  2. Layout our models UV’s while assigning texture maps.
  3. Render our final textured model.
Lets get started shall we!

First we need to Acquire our model.

  1. 1. Download crapsTable.zip and save it to your maya projects directory
  2. 2. Unzip/Extract the crapsTable.zip file so that you have the crapsTable project folder in your maya projects directory.
  3. 3. Open maya and go to file> Project> Set
    • Navigate to your maya projects directory and choose the crapsTable project.
  4. 4. Go to file>Open Scene and choose the crapsTable.ma file
  5. 5. Once the file is opened you should see the craps table model sitting on the grid. See image below.

Take this time to familiarize yourself with the model. Rotate around it, zoom in, select the various objects in the scene and check out the topology.

Open the outliner and see what things are named.

Notice the layers on the bottom right, turn them on and off to see how its laid out.

Everything is laid out and named and split apart to make the texturing process easier. Any good modeler will do this for you, however, you may get a solid model and have to split it up yourself. Taking a look at your reference imagery you may want to split your model up your model so the areas with different textures are separate.

Next take a look at the UV’s for the model. (Select the top level group, and open the UV Texture editor).

Yuuuuuuuuuuucccccckkkkkkk!!!!!

I know what you are thinking. This is horrible!

Now do you believe me when I told you that the UV’s can get nasty when you have been just focusing on modeling your object?

Milestone ‘A’ has been reached! We have our model. Let’s recap and see what we need to do next.

  1. Acquire our model
  2. Layout our models UV’s while assigning texture maps.
  3. Render our final textured model.

Milestone B is to Layout our models UV’s so that we can go about texturing this thing in a successful manner.

UV Mapping I – “Dice”

By Brad Swardson on June 7, 2009

uvdiceIn this tutorial I am going to walk you through an introduction to laying out your models UV’s for use in applying texture maps to your model that do more than simply make it red, blue, yellow, desert sand bug, or a checker board. Yes! I know you are shocked! What more could you possibly need then a shaders color channel and checker a board texture? Not much, but after hours of searching I finally found something that needed something more. :-)

A die.

No, nothing about death you morbid people. A single die, like dice but only 1 of them :-)

In this tutorial we will go through introductory steps as to how to apply a single file texture (tif image file) to our model in order to change it from a simple cube into a die.

For those of you sheltered individuals who have never seen a die before, here is an image of a couple.

diceImage

You will notice that each of the sides of the die in the image has successive dots going from 1 to 6. In order to properly create our die we need our dots to be on the correct sides.

1 dot is opposite of 6, 2 is opposite of 5, and 3 is opposite of 4.

For this tutorial we have some milestones we need to hit in order to call this project complete.

Here they are:

  1. Acquire our model
  2. Acquire and assign our texture map
  3. Layout our models UV’s.
  4. Render our final textured model.
Lets get started shall we!

First we need to Acquire our model.

  1. 1. Download simpleDie.zip and save it to your maya projects directory
  2. 2. Unzip/Extract the simpleDice.zip file so that you have the simpleDie project folder in your maya projects directory.
  3. 3. Open maya and go to file> Project> Set
    • Navigate to your maya projects directory and choose the simpleDie project.
  4. 4. Go to file>Open Scene and choose the simpleDie.ma file
  5. 5. Once the file is opened you should see a simple polygon cube sitting on the grid. See image below.

picture1

I have wireframe on shaded turned on for this tutorial. If your file does not look like mine do the following:

In your panel view go to Shading and choose ‘Wireframe on Shaded’ to toggle it on and off.

We are going to spending an equal amount of time during this tutorial between our perspective view and our UV texture editing window. To open this window go to your Main Menu Bar > Window > UV Texture Editor. See image below.

Picture 2

There are a number of tools and options built into this window, some of which we will utilize in this tutorial while others we will not. I highly recommend you read up on the remaining tools and experiment with their uses on your own at another time to familiarize yourself with the full scope of UV mapping tools Maya has to offer.

Milestone ‘A’ has been reached! We have our model. Let’s recap and see what we need to do next.

  1. Acquire our model
  2. Acquire and assign our texture map
  3. Layout our models UV’s
  4. Render our final textured model

Milestone B is to acquire our texture map. However, before we do that, lets look further at our model and its UV’s to determine what they look like and where we need to go next.