Danny's UV tools ROCK!!!
 

HOLY CRAP!!!

I finally got a chance to start texturing part of my ARGUS ship model, and just watching the UV editor window while the UVLayout script is running was SOOOO fricken COOL!!

Kudos to you and all who worked on it!!!

It has turned what I thought was going to be a month or longer texturing process, into probably about a week!

Thanks Izzy! Glad to hear you like the scripts. :)

I cant get them to work... then again i suck=( not good with mel.. make a tut for me...... Muhahahaha

Kurt, what's not working with the scripts? If you followed the directions in the readme file, everything should work ok.

Yeah im just slow heheheh.. im dyslexic, and some times what should be easy gives me trouble=(...

question...
 

Ok, now that my uv's are laid out almost, (hehe... I said laid, hehe..)
I'm not done yet, but I wanted to ask you now befor I continue to possibly uv myself into a corner that I cant get out of.

Below is a shot of them on my unsmoothed cabin to my ship model. (not quite done tweaking details yet tho.

Eventually, I wanna have the pieces welded together to make one big piece, (like you did on your test character)
..or even a few large pieces, so I can export it to PS, paint it, then import it back to Maya.

I wanted to ask if I'm starting with a LOT of shaders, then I join all the major UV pieces that can be joined, how do I know what shader belongs to the lager, newly joined UV piece(s)?

..so that I can know what shader to put the image onto.

Thanks for any info!

Well, it really doesn't matter too much which shaders are on the faces. The vast number of shaders generated by my scripts are simply there for the purposes of projection mapping. Once that is done, you don't need them anymore. What I generally do is assign a completely new shader to the entire shape and just delete all of the now unused colored lamberts. If you need to find out which shader is assigned to a particular face, you can use getMaterial.mel for that.

DUH!!! my bad:)

Got it:)

Thanks man, and if I have any other q's, I'll either pm ya, or most likely ask you in irc while I'm doin it:)

One last thing...

Your shader tip worked a charm:)

However, after spending about 4 hours tweaking uv's, I thought of something. (doh!!)

Um, should I be selecting faces, and running your scripts on my object AFTER smoothing it?
..or before smoothing?

I ask because after doing a uv snapshot of my unsmoothed object uv's, I plopped a test texture in it & saved it out as a tif, then I applied that back to the color slot of my shader, and did a test render, and...

It was garbled a bit?

Just wondering:)

File -> Optimize Scene Size also gets rid of unused render nodes. Be sure to check the options so you don't accidentally delete something important...

Izzy.. thanks dude its working now=)

NP:)

You might want to try deleting the history before smoothing. I've found that when dealing UVs, the history can cause a lot of problems.

ooops, sry, I meant to say that it was garbled AFTER I smoothed it.

Will try the history tip now:)

Thanks!

Well, I think I may have done something wrong, cause it's still doing it:(
(SEE PIC BELOW)

I have NO problems starting over, as I have a non-uv'd backup of my model piece, so I was wondering if I should just smooth it first, then just suck-it-up and deal with wading through the high poly/uv count?

Again, sorry for being a pain...

PS - lemme know if I should start posting this in the Texturing section, as this doesn't really have much more to do with your awsome tools:)

Hmm... not sure how to fix that. That's nothing wrong with my scripts -- it's definitely an issue with how Maya handles mesh smoothing and UVs. You might check out this page for a possible solution (I haven't tried it myself yet, but I've seen lots of references to it on CG-Talk):

http://www.drone.org/tutorials/uv_smoothing.html

Gonna keep this url! Thanks.... :)

Thanks much for all your help m8!

Thanks for the tut Danny!

..only one problem... he doesn't have that plug compiled for 4.5 :(

..well.. back to the drawing board..

I had the same problem:

http://forums.simplymaya.com/showthr...?threadid=5293

I never thought of deleting the history...
:(

ALan

Danny just to say thanks for this script- I mentioned UV Unwrap and you mentioned you had written a script that did the same things, so I thought I would give it a try. It works really well!

Used it for my fish in the tournament thing we are currently doing and it made life much easier. I finally had a UV layout that was useable to paint with in PS and it went back on the model with only a little tweaking needed. Combined with the SM tut on UV wrapping (with the rabbit) and I finally have a little more understanding of this UV mapping lark. Thanks!

I remember that man... sorry I couldn't help ya, as you can see, I'm having the same issue.

Danny gave a link above to a GREAT explanation for the reason why we are having these problems, (THANKS DANNY!!!)

...anyway, the guys' friend wrote a plugin for Maya 4.0 that cures the issue, however I believe both of us are on Maya 4.5....

Though the theory can be implemented by hand quite easily, my fear is that I might be wasting my time because I cannot believe we are the only two with this issue.

So for poops & giggles, I'm going to try posting at CGTalk to see what others have done.

..yeah, yeah, I know, it's dangerous to post there, but hopefully, my kung-fu will prevail:) hehe...

Wish me luck, and I'll post any help I get in the proper sectionfrom now on...




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.....starting...... NOW! hehe...

hey danny,

i use your uvtools from now on ......works real good...

a friend 3rdDimension told me about it....


thanks..

Hi Rage,

have you e.g. tried SmoothUV... it should work with 4.5 -->
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/coyhot/Code_SmoothUV.htm

it is in french, but you can get some of it translated throu this site... -->
http://babelfish.altavista.com/
(otherwise english is included in the downlabled file)

I believe it is on Highend also, but I can't remenber were... :)

there is also some goodies on this site "Creating High Res Polygonal Models"... where Ben Bathen comes with some good things regarding UV...
http://www.benbathen.com/Tutorial.html
the tutorial and melscripts can be downloaded on this site...
http://www.benbathen.com/MelScripts.html

I don't know if it will solve your problem... otherwise we could hope that Imre Tüske will update the plugin which is used on Oliver's site... :)

regards

Strarup

Thanks for the tips and links starup!

...problem is, I just upgraded to 5.0, and the problems seem to have been fixed:)

Thanks for the 4.5 tips and links as I'm SURE someone will find them very handy m8!