Rectangular UV Map?
Hey all,
I kinda suck at UV Mapping, but one thing I've been wanting to do is to use rectangular UV maps to make the texture space a bit more efficient without chopping it up into lots of pieces especially with the hallway I'm working on (I dunno if its my lack of experience but I notice that if I cut a flat surface in two the UV seam will cause the normal to be dark on one side and brighter on the other).
I'm not really sure about how to proceed with this, should I simply make a rectangular texture map then squash the UVs together by 50%, if so how do I do it in maya or use another program to do this? I want to be able to use it in UnrealEd3. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I kinda suck at UV Mapping, but one thing I've been wanting to do is to use rectangular UV maps to make the texture space a bit more efficient without chopping it up into lots of pieces especially with the hallway I'm working on (I dunno if its my lack of experience but I notice that if I cut a flat surface in two the UV seam will cause the normal to be dark on one side and brighter on the other).
I'm not really sure about how to proceed with this, should I simply make a rectangular texture map then squash the UVs together by 50%, if so how do I do it in maya or use another program to do this? I want to be able to use it in UnrealEd3. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Replies
say if your making a 1024x512 for example, just unwrap it as you would normally... then when you pack your uv's, fill it up so it doesnt go beyond halfway of the square uv space. then when you're satisfied, scale the v by 2, so it fits onto the square space perfectly, however remains elongated, then render a 1024x512 texture.... so it squishes back into place when you apply the texture
Not sure if there is some fancy tool in Maya or whatever else to set that up, and there could be some sort of secret, mysterious wisdom of the ancients out there to prove me wrong, but as far as I know, UVs are written within the 0-1 bounds, then scaled proportionately to your square or rectangular texture.
I tend to work on such textures square, for example, the upper half or left side of a 2048, then chop off the lower half (of the image files) and scale the UVs when it's done. Makes it easier to preview and edit the UVs and such.
edit: but it does take a bit of precise maneuvering to scale them out and then back down, some sort of numerical editor - that is, scale up by exactly 2, then by half on one axis, or set to UV X and Y position 0.5, etc. Silo does this in a very straightforward manner; I would be surprised if Maya didn't also have this basic functionality.
- There's an option to use your textures aspect ratio.
- You can use relative numeric transforms (move, rotate, scale depending on what tool you have active) Just click the cryptic icon highlighted in this image and type in the value in the boxes next to it and hit enter.
There was a script or method to force max to display the first map in the drop down list instead of the default checker. For the life of me I can't remember what it was but it involved editing the unwrapUI macro script... I think MoP came up with the idea after tinkering around in chuggnuts tools or something?
Or you can check on Use Custom Bitmap Size and set its dimensions to whatever your texture is. That will work if you don't yet have a texture assigned or selected in the drop down. It also forces that size no matter what...
Either way you want to set up that rectangle sooner rather than latter.
Hope that helps.