Onto UV Mapping

Now that my block-out is finished I moved onto UV mapping which I had never done before. I used the Urban Environment videos from Digital Tutors so I could get to grips with it, especially when it came to objects such as buildings. 

UV mapping wasn't as hard as I initially thought. At first it was a little overwhelming but one of the most useful UV mapping tools that Maya has to offer is the option, 'automatic mapping'. Automatic mapping makes the UV's easier to understand to some degree because it lays out the UV's waiting to be solved like jigsaw puzzle. To make things easier, I applied a checker texture onto the model I was UV mapping so I could see the affects of moving and scaling the UV's. Scaling the UV's up gives a better resolution for it comes to texturing. UV's can also be overlapped, so when a texture is applied, it applies to all UV's in that are of the UV map. I learned that the upper right quadrant of the UV map is where all of the UV's have to be, however the other three quadrants are for 'workspace'. I tried using the additional space for creating higher resolution on some parts of my buildings but when I tried to apply the texture it wouldn't apply correctly. I pondered whether there was some way to use the four quadrants but I never managed to find a solution. There was a mention of creating a new "set of UV's" or something but I'm completely unsure. 

Anyway, here are a look at some UV maps I've pieced together for texturing. 

Barrel UV

Building A UV

Building B UV

The important thing I learned from UV mapping was to leave as little white space as I could; by white space I mean the area of the grid which isn't been used with UV's. 

I understand that for people who aren't familiar with UV's the pictures above will look like nonsense. My next post showing the textures over the UV maps will hopefully make it a little clearer for those people!

Thanks for reading

Gavin