why is UV mapping so hard ?
 

Hello to everyone.

I have been working with maya for about a year now and i am starting to get the hang of it, mainly modeling. Now i am beginning to focus on texturing and uv-mapping. I have made some simple textures using automated mapping, and recently, i have been experimenting with the pelting tool plug-in, but it is buggy. Both ways of making uv-maps seems very hard, especially automated mapping. I know about the program called uv-layout but it is for pc only and i am a mac user. There must be a way to do it without stitching them all together by hand, but how ? ? ?

all replies are most welcome.

personally i do mostly by hand myself, but I guess I'm practiced enough at it that it goes pretty quickly. i can generally model, UV map, render normal maps, create textures, and finish a first pass at an art asset in a single 8 hour period, depending on complexity (like, a piece of furniture).

But yeah, when you're first getting into it, there is a bit of a learning curve. Just takes practice really.

Even if I had pelting available, I don't think I'd just take it as is. i'd still want to hand-tweak.

Its just practice i'm afraid. I still find it really hard and time consuming. Best advice i can give you is get a movie tutorial on texturing there are loads of time saving tips that will help you.

though luck i gues... tweaking them all together by hand seems very time consuming but also kind of relaxing (like putting together a big puzzle).
I guess i just need to know a bit more functions before taking on the more complex meshes.

Thanks for the replays :beer:

Hi

When i first started using maya i bought some of the tutorial videos and as a result ended up unpacking every single uv on my models, now im a little more used to it i do about 20% of the wrangling that i used to do.

Basicaly i copy my model, then combine all the small pieces into single meshes, and i cylindrical map as much as i can, only unpacking where it particulaly stretches on certain faces. The secret realy is in being creative with texture maps, if you play around with contrast, hue and saturation, multiplying textures on top of each other you blend virtualy anything, and the more abstract the underlying pattern, the less likely you are to see seems and stretches. Dont worry about the textures looking really messy, what i do is save it all out as a jpeg and then play with contrast and brightness until it blends down.
See my wip star wars thread i use this technique on all the models there.

i dont really find it ttoo hard just really boring...:headbang:

paldav has a good method though:beer: