Texture Mapping

February 21, 2003

By Brian J. Immel

3D Paint Tool

1. Apply a new shader to the surface (lambert).

2. Select the object to be painted.

3. Make sure the viewport is in Texture mode (shortcut key 6). Otherwise, we won’t be able to see what we are about to do.

4. Go to Rendering > Texturing > 3D Paint Tool option box. When the tool first becomes active, you’ll notice a big circle with an X through it. This is Maya’s way of telling you that there is painted map assigned to this surface attribute.

• Down towards the bottom is a section called File Textures. Set the Attribute to Paint to Color. Also choose Maya IFF (iff) for Image Format. You can choose a wide variety of formats but IFF, Targa and TIFFs are the best for this job.
• Click the Assign Textures button
  • Upon clicking this button, a small window appears asking for the X and Y size of the Assigning File Texture. Choose at least 512x512 but I usually paint at 1024x1024.
  • Hit the Assign Textures button. You’ll notice a slight shift in the gray color of the surface and now you paint brush doesn’t have the X through it anymore. We have successfully assigned a new texture map and are ready to start painting color to the surface within Maya.

• Back towards the top we can choose to use a different type of brush under the Brush section by simply clicking on one of the icons in the Artisan section or by going to Browse button to load something else other than Maya’s default brush types. Also be sure that Rotate To Stroke is enabled. This will help you paint in 3D better.
• If you know how to create paintbrushes using older versions of Photoshop (versions 4 through 6) then you can create your own custom brush from any type of grayscale image.

• Color
• Color is the color used for the brush.
  • Click the color chip to bring up the Color Chooser window.
• Flood Color will flood the entire surface with whatever color that is in the color chip next to it.
  • Click the color chip to bring up the Color Chooser window.
• Opacity is how opaque the brush color will be.
• Flood All button will flood the entire surface with the color in the Flood Color.
• Flood Selected will flood just selected portions of the surface (do this by selecting faces).
• Paint Operations
  • Artisan Paint (default color painting setting)
  • Artisan Erase
  • Artisan Clone
  • Paint Effects Paint (need to load a Paint Effects attribute into the Color1 Attribute)
  • Paint Effects Smear
  • Paint Effects Blur
  • Reset Brushes
  • Blend mode works the same as Photoshop’s Brush tool modes.
    • Default
    • Lighten
    • Darken
    • Multiple
    • Screen
    • Overlay
• Stroke
  • You can paint both sides of the surface at the same time if you use Reflection X, Y, and/or Z.

 

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Texturing NURBS	Texturing Polygons - Displaying Polygon components	Texturing Polygons - Edit Polygons > Texture	Texturing Polygons - Creating UV maps from Projections
Texturing Polygons - Basics of Editing UVs	Texturing Polygons - Using Photoshop to paint UV maps	3D Paint Tool	Mapping problems