This week we learned to use the UV edit to unwrap and texture our 3D assets. This is an aspect I have found most challenging so far since I started using Maya. In class we went through a few tutorials with Mike then had a go at attempting it ourselves. We had created a cube and a cylinder and the aim of the task was to apply a dice texture to the cube and a coca cola cover to the cylinder to make it look like a can of coke. I did struggle with this in class but got some help from Mike.
After class when I got home I decided to start from scratch again and went through the tutorials that had been uploaded to Blackboard to try and get a good understanding. I hope that if I keep getting practice at it, I will eventually get the grasp of it and wont find it so difficult.
These are my attempts at texturing the cube, the cylinder and the hammer. The cube wasn’t too difficult, I took the image of the UV unwrap from Maya, saved it and brought it into Photoshop, where I also had brought in images of dice face, cut them into 6 pieces and layered them over the UV unwrap. Then i saved the UV unwrap as jpeg and brought it back into Maya and applied it as a lambert material on the cube. The cylinder also wasn’t hard as it was a primitive object so just needed a few cuts to the edges and it unfolded fine. I then did the same process in Photoshop but placed the coke texture on top.
The hammer however was a bit tricky as it required more cuts to unwrap. I had to separate the different sections of the hammer and then make cuts to each part before unfolding it. Once it was unfolded I took the image of the unwrap and brought it into Photoshop. From here I placed the wood and metal textures over the specific parts of the hammer in the UV unwrap. Any part that was to have a metal texture, I placed the metal image over it, this was the same for the wood. It was then saved as jpeg and placed on the hammer model in Maya as a material.
Overall my experience with Maya is pretty good. I do enjoy using it and hope to develop my skills on it. The UV unwrap and texturing is a little tricky but I feel with lots of practice and effort I can hopefully overcome the difficulty.