Final Major Project - UV'ing My Model

Final Major Project - UV'ing My Model

Now that everything has had the changes needed, it was ready to be UV'd. UV'ing is a way of converting a 3D object into a 2D one by unfolding and laying it out flat. I did this by going to my UV editor and then selecting the object I want to UV. I did this section-by-section and not all at once.

UV was something I always found difficult so I turned to Chris to show me a lot of the basics such as transform tools while in the UV window, cutting, moving and sewing seams together.

I always referred to a video made by James Taylor on YouTube. That can be found here.

I started off with the roof since that was the most complex with the multi-cuts and drastic mesh changes I had already made to it. So, what I did was select the roof and then go to my UV editor. From here, I needed to unfold the UV's so I can start cutting and sewing whatever edges needed.

Here is what my roof looked like prior to UV mapping it correctly.

As you can see from the UV editor everything is scrambled since Maya will unfold it in the most random way possible. So, what I will do is highlight the correct edges by right-click>edges and then finding the correct edges which I will then move and sew by shift+right-click>move and sew.

After doing this for an entire day, I finally got it done. Here is what my roof looks like UV'd.

As you can see, it is a whole lot more clearer and neatly layed out. The importance of this is so that when I texture my roof and building non of the textures are distorted. One way of checking this is by downloading a grid texture and then applying it. The grid will allow you to notice any distortion.

This is the before and after UV with the grid texture applied.

Here is the texture applied after UV'ing the model.

As you can see when I UV'd it properly, there is no stretching or skewing of the texture.

From here I repeated this process for each segment of the building. Which from here would allow me to texture it freely now. If after texturing there are any extras to add then I will.