Texture Mapping
February 21, 2003
By Brian J. Immel
Creating UV Maps from Projections
Planar Mapping
Mapping Direction
- X Axis – projects a map of the entire object or select faces on the X plane.
- Y Axis – projects a map of the entire object or select faces on the Y plane.
- Z Axis – projects a map of the entire object or select faces on the Z plane.
- Camera – projects a map of the entire object or select faces according to the angle of the camera to the surface. This type of Planar mapping works the best and fastest because you define a number of maps of a round surface with a lot of control.
- Select face components to generate separate projection maps.
Cylindrical Mapping
Creates a cylindrical map around the surface. This works pretty well if the object is more like a tube in shape. But this doesn’t work so well for faces because shapes like the nose, mouth and ears break up that simple cylindrical shape.
Spherical Mapping
Creates a ball-shaped map around the selected faces. This only works well if the object is more or less a ball. Again, this won’t work too well for faces.
Automatic Mapping
Maya tries to break apart the surface best it figures.
Using the option box, we can tell it to Automatic Map using a limited range of Planes, Optimize for Less Distortion or Fewer Pieces, Layout either Along U or Into Square, Scale either by None, Uniform or Stretch to Square and set Spacing Presets to name most of the options. Each one of these options will change the layout of the Auto Mapping feature but because Maya doesn’t know what kind of shape this object is, it can and will break the surface down to something that we would have to be rebuild most of the UVs to get something usable out of it. I normally don’t use this type of mapping option. I use Planar Mapping set to the camera 95% of the time so I can control the UV creation better.
Each time we create a new UV map, we need to move it off the default creation location in the UV Texture Editor. Otherwise, every UV map we create will sit on top of the previous map and make out mapping work all for nothing.
| << Back to Edit Polygons > Texture | |
| << Back to Maya Workshop page |