Research: Maya

In order to improve my UV mapping skills I decided to create an asset in Maya as well as the texture within Photoshop. I used this opportunity to get back into the flow of creating assets. I decided to create my own version of one of the photographs I had for reference from the Midlands trip.

In the previous week I had followed a tutorial for UV mapping a chest, and felt it was time to try the process again while creating my own object.

This was the pouring vat I found within the Kelham Industrial Museum. 

First I created the main part of the vat using a basic cylinder shape, extruding to add details and define the shape. I added the arms using the same method.

Next came the more difficult part, I added a UV grid in order to check how the faces looked and to see which were skewed. This is where the tutorial was most useful, with many commands I previously did not know. These helped speed the process up.

First hold down ctrl and right click on the UV texture editor. This brings up the menu enabling you to click the to UV option. This enables much easier manipulation of the UVs as shown below.

The next useful command is holding R to scale, something which I had previously done manually. The same goes for W to move objects, and E to rotate.

Once the UVs were as accurate as I could make them I then began creating the asset texture on Photoshop. Creating then testing each part on Maya until I had covered all of the faces.

 This was the final result, which I was mostly happy with. As my BA8 project will be photo-realistic I decided to stick with the same theme in this example. The UVs seemed to behave well and I was pleased with the way the texture looked on the object, with no glaringly obvious faults.

 This tutorial was highly useful throughout the process, and I feel I have a much greater understanding of UV mapping now.

The chest I created using the tutorial.