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Steven: Hi and welcome to 3dmotive.com.
My name is Steven G. Wells,
I'm a senior 3D artist.
In this little tips and tricks tutorial,
we're gonna take a look at the UV texture editor
in Maya.
We're gonna be using this little model here.
It's a fantasy shield.
It's got a little fun demon head on it.
There's no lighting or anything in this scene.
This was all hand painted.
This actually was done for a class, I think,
I was doing for hand painting textures.
So, there's no fun shaders on it,
but it still, I think it looks pretty good
and it will work for what we need.
Let's go ahead and take a look at
the texture editor itself.
This is the Maya interface.
Now, there's a couple different ways
to get to the UV texture editor in Maya.
One of them is to create a shortcut,
which I have.
I have my own little custom shelf.
I have my little shortcut right there.
That's the UV texture editor.
So, it kind of comes up big.
Let me zoom it down a little bit. There we go.
That's the UV texture editor. All right?
Or, you can go to Window and just scroll down
to UV texture editor. There you go.
Now, this is the one-to-one UV texture space.
Obviously nothing's showing right now
because we don't have anything selected.
We have to be able to select something first.
So, I'm gonna keep the model itself
in the left-hand side so we can see
what it's gonna look like.
Let's go ahead and select it
and as you can see, there's the UV's right there.
All right? You can see it's a little poly mesh,
but I think it works for what we need.
Now, the thing about the UV texture editor in Maya
is you can't select anything
and I'm trying to select stuff.
There's nothing to select.
Maya doesn't understand that even though
you're in the UV texture editor,
it doesn't understand that you're gonna
actually be messing around with the UV's.
You actually have to tell it you're gonna be
messing with the UV's.
In order to do that,
you have to right-click and you have
edges, vertices, faces, and as you can see
right here, UV's. Okay?
We want to make sure we select the UV's.
If we're selecting anything else,
for instance, let's grab the edges.
I grab those or the, I'm sorry.
Yeah, I was on the edges.
Let's go to vertices actually.
Go to vertexes, hit W and let's go ahead
and try and move this around a little bit.
You really can't do anything with it.
You can move the model over here by grabbing it,
but the point is you can't do that
within this texture editor.
You also don't want to.
You have to be careful when you're working
because this is assuming you want to actually
muck around with the actual geometry of the model
and you don't want to do that.
So the only thing you want to do
when you're in the texture editor in Maya
is when you right-click, go to UV's. UV's only.
Now if I select vertices, you'll see,
they turn green and I actually have
the capability to move the UV's around.
You can see it actually affect on the model.
Let me zoom in a little bit and you can watch
how that affects it on the model itself, okay?
You will get ...
You'll know you're in the UV's when you
select vertices because you'll get the move tool.
By the way, to move and pan around and everything,
it's the same controls outside in the regular view port
in Maya.
In other words, I can hold my Alt
and I can right mouse, I can zoom in and zoom out.
Middle mouse, Alt is panning around.
Now, here's the difference.
Left Alt is still just panning around.
We have no three dimensional view here.
Three dimensional view is only for our view port,
but we can still zoom in and zoom out as we need to
or pan around as we need to, all right?
And the really nice thing is
whatever we could do over here for moving vertices,
it's the same controls here, the same shortcuts.
So, I can actually move just, you know,
using the Y, there's the green.
I can move in just the X
or, of course, I can kind of grab off to one center
and I can just rotate it around as I need to.
Very simple.
The really nice thing is I can then grab that.
I can also hit E to rotate,
so I can actually rotate these vertices around, okay?
I can also hit R to scale those vertices.
I can squeeze them in, blow them up, whatever.
The same controls for moving, rotating and scaling
in our view port, our 3D view port,
are the same controls within the 2D UV editor
in Maya.
Now, if I wanted to grab the vertices
of just the face,
in order to do that I can do 1 of 2 different ways.
I can just rope an area and grab all the vertices,
but now I have to zoom in
and I have to hold my Ctl key down
and I have to deselect these vertices here, okay?
So, let me go ahead and do that really quick.
And let's hold my Ctl key, deselect these.
Oops, I deselected one I want to keep.
That's okay. I can just hold my shift
and I can add that right back in. All right.
Now that I've got all of the UV's for just the face
I can hit W to move it and again I can move it
and do whatever I want with it.
Now it works perfectly,
but that's kind of counter productive.
To have to zoom in and have to deselect vertices
and re-select vertices as that,
it's time consuming.
One of the nice features in the texture editor
is I can grab a single vertices
and I can go up here to select
and I can grab select shell.
That grabs the whole thing at once.
Nice and easy. Very quick, very simple.
Do the same thing over here.
Grab just a few, select shell.
There we go. Okay?
It's a great little feature.
It's very quick to be able to grab
the shell or the islands.
These are the UV islands.
In Maya, of course, they call them shells,
but same difference.
It's, pretty much, every other program
they're UV islands. It's the same thing.
Now you have a few functionality's up here,
a few functions.
Let's go ahead and grab the face, for instance.
We're gonna select and go to select shell.
Now here you can see we can rotate our UV's.
There you go.
We can rotate them again.
We can back rotate them, all right?
There are a couple of different things up here.
You just have to hold your mouse over.
If you hold your mouse over you can see
which one is good.
One is select, flipping the vertices in the U
and one is flipping them in the V,
so you can do that.
It's basically inverting them.
Re-do it and they realign just fine.
There's a bunch of different little controls in here
you can weld vertices, you can weld edges
and things like that.
You can also turn off, if you get tired
of seeing your texture, if it's hard to see something,
you can click that little icon here,
see the little face there?
You can actually have then the UV space
without your texture in it.
By the way, this is the one-to-one UV space
is what we want to make sure our textures always
are within is this particular border, okay?
We can also go for this.
This does a black and white version, all right?
Or we can go back to color.
Fun little texture editor.
Different things you can do in it.
The main features, however, of course
are going to be just moving vertices
and again, you can move vertices as you need to.
If you needed to fix certain vertices,
you can just grab them.
You can hold your shift key down.
I'm just gonna add in the selection, hold in my shift,
just grab some vertices and now I can just move them
so it's great for moving just vertices
as you need to or again, select shell
and you have the whole kit-n-kaboodle right there.
All right, very quick introduction,
but that's the basics for the UV texture editor in Maya.
My name is Steven G. Wells
and this has been 3dmotive.com.
Thanks very much for watching.