Creating UV maps and Photoshop texturing

For the past few lessons in Visual Development we have been working on an ongoing project that covers UVing, texturing, diffuse, reflections, caustics, projections, and other concepts. We used a simple scene with a few different props, each with different materials that would react differently to light, to showcase these concepts.

First was the scraper. With the scraper I reenforced some UV and texturing concepts that I've known for a while now, but haven't really used that much. The model was provided to us but had a default UV map which is unusable when applying a texture to it. More often then not, when making textures for models, I would use automatic mapping and be done with it, if textures were not the main focus of the project. Working on this scraper has shown me how important it is to manually make UVs and how easy it makes your life when texturing in Photoshop (A quick tip to make sure your texture wont be stretched later is applying a checker pattern to the geometry to make sure the UVs are making perfect squares.)

scraper without texture

A new workflow technique I learned with this project is a very useful UV layout one. When laying out UVs in 0 to 1 space you do not need to make your layout a perfect square (sometimes a rectangle can be more efficient.) The picture below shows that you can layout UVs in the 0 to .5 space without any distortion, but before you save the UV snapshot scale them up to fit 0 to 1 and save it 2056x1028 instead of 2056x2056 (or any other numbers as long as they are the same aspect ratio.)

converting 0 to .5 into 0 to 1 space

Doing this will create a nice clean UV snapshot that is easy to follow and make an effective texture, while also using as much of the UV space as possible. With a perfect square, the three big pieces would be hard to layout without a bunch of dead space that will only go to waist. Speaking of an efficient layout, the tiny pieces in the holes of the handle are parts of the UVs that are never seen in any camera angle, they are covered by other geometry. Because of this I just scaled them very small and tossed them in an area I wasn't using, to make room for the UVs that were more important.

scraper UV texture map with an effective layout

Now that we have an effective UV snapshot, all that's left is creating the texture in photoshop, which with the reference images provided was not to hard.

REFERENCE

This is what I came up with. I just used standard Photoshop workflow, like masks and transform tools. I also painted out the specular highlights because they will be added later in Maya.

I really do enjoy UVing in Maya and making textures in Photoshop. Next time we'll look at projections in Maya and adding details without making a full texture.