A guide through UV Editing
Throughout the last two days, I have be working heavily on Texture designing and UV Editing. Although I am a first year, the feedbacks I have been given are very positive. So I have decided to make a step by step tutorial on how to do add your own textures into Autodesk Maya.
Before you get started, you must first set a project up. You can set up a project by going onto file and look for the word "Set Project". When setting up a project, you will need a project folder, you can name your project folder anything you wish but it must include inside the project folder a folder called "sourceimages". sourceimages is where your textures are added when using Maya.
To add a texture onto a mesh (in this tutorial, we are working with the plane mesh), you must first click on "Edit UVs" and then select "UV Texture Editor.
Once you have selected the UV Texture Editor, a new window will open up and you should see this window:
The reason the outline of the plane or the model you are working on is presented in the top right hand corner is because the top right hand corner is positive and is on the U and V axis (hence the name UV map).
if your plane is not matching the outline seen in the UV editor, you can adjust the outline in the editor to match as closely to the mesh as possible. Now if you wish to add in your texture, you click on "Image" and click on "Create PSD Network".
After selecting "Creating PSD Network", you are met with this screen:
When you are adding in your texture, be sure your X and Y sizes are 1024x1024. When these settings are okay, you must select the color and bump attributes to move them to the "Selected Attributes" section.
Once the attributes are selected, you can now click on the "Create" button which will open up Adobe Photoshop.
With Adobe Photoshop open, you will see 2 folders in the layers section, one is the color folder where you will add your texture and there is a bump folder which is where you have your desaturated version of your texture as well as increased the brightness and mess around with the contrast in order to create a good bump effect in the render.
This image shows the bump map version of my texture I painted in photoshop. Once you have completed your texture setup in Photoshop, you can save the file, go back into Autodesk Maya's UV editor and click on the "Update PSD Network".
And now if you render your scene, your plane should give off a bump effect as demonstrated in the image below.
This has been Luke Knott and this is my worded tutorial on how to do UV mapping.
