Limited Room in UV Texture Editor

[Athorax]

Hello there. I am relatively new to Maya and UV Mapping in general, so excuse me if I say something wrong.

I am currently working on a sword, and I have finally UV mapped the entire blade and hilt. I ofcourse UV map the different parts individually. That means I get a UV Texture Editor window for each part.

My question is:
Now that i have mapped all of the parts, what can i do to gather all of the UV's in one Texture?
There are so many parts, and if i select the entire blade, the Editor looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/WjVsUIL.png

Can i make the UV square bigger to make room for them all, or does it not matter how much i downscale if all?

Thanks in advance.
Athorax

[stwert]

You can definitely scale all the UVs down. The only size that will make a difference will be the resolution of your image texture(s). You can do it manually, but the Polygons > Layout command can help things along. An alternative is to use multiple UV tiles, but that gets a bit more complex, so I'd recommend staying in the 0 to 1 space for now.

[Athorax]

Hey. Thanks for answering. I did try to use layout, but it shows my UV like this

http://i.imgur.com/CgIxe6t.png

Any idea what might cause this?

[stwert]

It's possible your UVs aren't merged together within a shell; try converting a small selection to a shell to see if the UVs are connected or not.

[Athorax]

I feel stupid asking this, but as i said im not very experienced in Maya. Could you please clarify what you mean? How do I convert something to a shell?

There was some UV objects that were not fully selected when i used the "Move UV Shell" tool. I tried Polygons > Merge UV's and it worked. I could then use layout for that texture editor file. I can't find the defect shell on a different texture though.

Edit: I just worked a bit with it. It can use it right now. It cleans it up weirdly though.
What are your thoughts on this: http://imgur.com/a/TiNd2 ? (top picture is the layout i made. Bottom one is Auto layout.)

[stwert]

Quick google will help you out with converting the selection: http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/Maya/files/Select--Convert-Selection--To-UV-Shell-htm.html

The layout on the top looks okay, except that in the top right you can see one of the pieces is flipped (red), so just select those UVs and use one of the flip commands to turn it around.

[Athorax]

I found out how it worked now! Your help is greatly appreciated. Now i can finally move on to something im familiar with; texturing.

My sincerest thanks and deepest respect. Have a great week! :)