am i laying my uv's right????
 

in max...we have something called material ID that u can assign in each polygon so that each polygon can have its own material....or submaterial ID....

i made a model in maya...i want the head,torso,legs,etc to have their own texture file/sheet.....how do i do this??? since i dont know how to do it,what i did is i layed everything(them UV's) in just one texture sheet...ala gaming models....i dont like the idea of working like this on a hi res model....please guide me...i dont think is is a silly question :-) i think this is pretty legit :-)

In maya you can just select some faces and say "assing material to selection" in the hypershade. Makes the material id ideology kind of futile.

Poly models can also have multiple UV sets so you could map UVs differently depending on your needs. Can't remember the details right now how to make use of the UV sets in the shader network. I'll try to remember to check this later...

kbrown: thanks in advance!!! :-)

the apply material to selection has a weakness...when u delete the model or when u make a duplicate,u will have to reassign all the polygons again....which counter productive and u will have to wire things again

wherein the material id stays there what ever u do to the polygon....

Just tested the duplicating (default settings) and all materials stayed intact. What do you mean by "when u delete the model"? :)

so far, when I've duplicated a model with UV maps, the duplicate is mapped the same way. If for some reason it's not, you can use the Polygon > Transfer (with UVs in the option) to transfer the original's UV layout to the duplicate.

How exactly do you "ass" a material to your selection Kbrown? :D

Haha... You don't want to know :D

:beer:

KB, hitting the whiskey again? ;)

lol @ danny... the bottle is empty now ;)

Back to the subject. Here's some info about the UV sets:

Under Edit Polygons -> Texture there are lots of different mapping commands. Most of them has an option to "Create New UV Set". If you tick this on and hit apply, the old UVs don't get overwritten but you get a new set of UVs (obviously ;)). You can tell this by looking in the marking menu item "UV Sets" of the object. There is the default "map1" and the new set you just created. By switching between these you control which UV you're editing in the UV Texture Editor. To use the sets you need to create a layered texture for your shader and use the UV Linking window to assing (:D) the layers (textures) to the UV sets they're intended to go with.

Here's a quick example I did in 5 mins. The parquet texture is using the map1 UV set and the shadow is actually a grid texture projected to a new UV set from the light.

Forgot to attach this one...

Here's how the UV Linking Relationship Editor looks for the above example

cool!!!
thanks a lot for the help!!! ill try my very best to master maya's uv's

kbrown: when i duplicate the model,will it be uv linked as well? or shall i manually assign them again?

cool stuff i just moved from max to maya too...

so wats the difference between placing a 2d texture node and a 3d texture node on a model?

5 minutes kbrown? If that wasnt clearly a box and you couldnt see the black around it i would of thought you just took a picture of a piece of wood :P. I really need to learn about texturing.. i dont even know how to link stuff together like you have in that image above with all those arrows (2 images above)

lol me too:D