Tiling problem with UV textures
 

Hi folks, I’m relatively new to Maya (2015) and learning as I go. I created UVs in Maya for a human model and placed the head on a second UV tile for greater detail (body parts in the U0-1/V0-1 tile and head in the U1-2/V0-1) tile). Then painted the UVs in Photoshop and assigned them. Sadly, Maya is constraining the textures to the U0-1/V0-1 tile only, so the textures are exactly half the size of the actual UV set. Is there a fix or am I just SOL? Thanks for any help.

In Maya 2015 there is the "Uv tiling mode" dropdown in the file texture's attribute editor, check that out. Without access to that, editing the file texture's placement node is your next option and it is a bit more convoluted.

The texture placement node's "translate frame" attributes will have to reflect your tile's coordinates on the grid, the default tile is of course 0,0. Your head tile would be at 1,0. Uncheck the wrap U and wrap V options or the texture will repeat unto the other tiles. At this point you'll probably see a lot of gray areas on your model. Take note of the "default color" channel under the color balance section of your file texture, it's responsible for that drab grey that's overtaken your model in the absence of texture information. So the file texture for the subsequent tile should simply be dragged and drop onto this channel to basically fill it in. Then it's a matter of rinsing and repeating with the appropriate translate frame values for all other file textures, each one being plugged into the default color channel of the one before. Aaaand this is why people throw their hands up and learn scripting.

Thank you
 

Thanks for responding, Genny. After playing with your suggestions a while and failing epically (I think because the head is part of the same texture file, not its own file), it seems like my best option is to redo the UVs and pack the head with everything else in 0,0. Fortunately, I saved my seams as quick sets, so while it’ll take time to have them recalculate, the results will be right. I just don’t understand how others simply move and enlarge the head and it seems to work without a hitch. Guess I got a bit ahead of my own learning curve. Cheers!

Wouldn't it be faster to simply cut the texture file in half and have one square texture file per uv space? I am fairly new to UV tiling myself, but it seems like a nice quick workflow when using multiple textures. Include u0v0 and then u1v0 in the filenames.

Edit: Alternately, I believe it might work in your place2dTexture node if you set the Coverage to 2, 1 (assuming your texture is twice as wide as it is high) and turn off Wrap U and Wrap V.

Yeah Stwert I was thinking of suggesting to crop and save the individual tiles. Thing is, I'm wondering what was the target resolution for the tiles and what's the resolution of the current texture as it would probably be counter productive to slice up a 4k map when what you really wanted were 4k tiles.

Hey guys, thanks for trying to find a solution for me. I did mess around with both of your ideas, but I seem to have a bigger (and clearly noob) issue: I have new single-tile UVs and they're test painted (just to get an idea of how they look), but no matter what I do I can't get the file textures to replace the unwrapcheckershader. I've tried everything I know but that G*D*** checker shader won't go away, and it's the only texture available to select in the UV Editor. If I had hair, I'd be tearing it out right now. WhaddoIdo?

Are you looking for your textures in the Texture dropdown menu in the UV Editor? If so, then that only shows the textures currently plugged into the material assigned to the selected object and even then it's only for preview purposes inside that editor. You'll have to plug your file texture into the desired channel on the material. Easy way if you already have the file node in your scene is to middle mouse drag and drop it from Hypershade into your shader's color channel for example.

My guess is multiple UV sets. That has been my undoing a few times, accidentally (somehow) creating a new UV set. You can check under the UV Sets to see if there is more than just map1, and then delete the other ones with Polygons > Delete Current UV Set.

Got it fixed
 

Well, thanks to both of you my UVs are now working. I didn't have duplicate sets; it turned out to be the problem Genny mentioned. Required a crash course in working with nodes and shader networks, but it's fine now (once I figured out how to eliminate the transparency). There's really not one single intuitive thing about Maya shaders, is there? I hugely appreciate your willingness to help -- you're both awesome! Cheers!! :beer: