how to keep my uvs in uv editor
 

each time I perform a new planar map and send them to the uv editor I get a new set of uv's and lose, or can no longer see the old uvs. This doesn't seem to happen to the Kurt in his videos.

I have lots of hours of uv mapping that I have downloaded from the site but none of them have any explanation of the tools used in the uv editor. None of them explain the options in the different option boxes that come with the uv editor. This is very frustrating for the beginning student since the artist is only performing operations without any explanations for the reason one method is chosen over any other.

Frustrated learner ...... looking for explanations about why things are done. Kinda of like watching Michael-Angelo paint, but never learning how he mixes his colors or understanding his reasons for certain color combinations.

the UV editor shows the UVs for the currently selected object. If you select a differnt object or nothing at all, then you won't see the UVs. also make sure an object is selected and not a face or something. Once you have laid out your UVs, you have to save the scene (or object) to keep them. I know what you mean about the UV editor though, I find the interface quite annoying - nowhere near as good as the rest of Maya.

got it figured out..the lost uv's
 

radical Edward,, thanks for the reply..

Like everything in Maya, to understand how a function works, you have to go in and do most of the operations yourself. The hands on kinesthetic way to figure things out, if you know what I mean. Just watching a video and assuming that you will be able to mimic the teacher's results never seems to work. I suppose the teacher has encountered the same problems during his/her learning curve and has forgotten that you, the student, need even the most rudimentary explanations to get through a simple procedure. By going into Maya and playing around with the program on your own seems to be the only way to master the stupid thing. To be told to go into an option box, click on option x, and then close the box, and everything will work, affords me no way to understand why I should choose one option over another. I know the writers of the program put all those other options in there for a reason. I am praying and hoping that the video instructor will explain to me why he/she selected one option over another. At least when I purchase an instructional video over the internet, I assume that the instructor will explain the why about each of those options. Since my forays into the tutorial world of Maya some eight months ago, I seldom find tutorials that really explain the inner workings of the program. I find instead that the artist/instructor shows me their great talent at manipulating the intricacies of the program but don't show me the why for behind their very impressive outcomes.

Sorry,

I forgot to say that the uv's don't really disappear when you do a new planar projection map. Actually, I discovered that even though they seem to have entered the nether world, they truly haven't gone anywhere. When I click my mouse button over an area in my perspective or orthographic view, wallah, they suddenly reappear in the uv texture editor. I also discovered that all primitives are already unwrapped. So if you make a primitive and open up the editor you will see the uvs already unfolded. If you select some faces in a camera view, assign a shader and a color to those faces, and then select those faces for projection, those faces, or rather the uv's associated with those faces, will appear in the uv editor. These selected uvs, if moved in the editor, are no longer associated with the primitive. They stand alone. This was an easy way for me to see how uv's can be selected and moved. Now if I select an edge in the editor, one from say the uvs I just moved, I can select its corresponding adjacent edge. If I select that edge I can see how it is associated with an adjacent edge from another side of the cube. I hit move and sew uvs and those edges snap together. I'm done. A thing of beauty. This for me, was an easy way, to see how the uv editor works. I didn't have to unwrap a three-headed monster, do five projections on it, and then try and sew them all back together. I think I could actually begin to do such a thing because I taught myself the basic foundation of how the editor functions.

Carry on good fellow Maya maniacs....