Intro to Texturing in Maya 2020 (1/2)

hey guys it's monica at academic phoenix plus and welcome to an introduction to texturing tutorial this is a fundamental lesson on how to put a texture on something like a cube so let's go ahead and get started we're going to start off with just a basic cube so up over here at the top there's a little polygon tab you can click on this cube and you'll get a cube let's bring it up and then let's go ahead and scale just because it's always nice to see it bigger let's delete the history by clicking on this little guy right here which will remove the inputs and also freeze the transformations which will zero all of this out except for scale which will keep it at one again this is going to be a fundamental lesson on how to texture and object we are going to be texturing this cube so that it looks like a crate it's pretty amazing because what we're going to be doing is taking a 3d object laying it out flat so that we can draw on it in a 2d software such as photoshop so that it looks like something right now it just looks like a very boring cube and we're going to make something really cool out of it so the first thing we're going to do is take a look at our uvs so right now we just have faces edges and vertices but there's also a fourth channel which is called uvs and you can go up here to the top under uvs and go to uv editor again if you don't see that it's probably because you're in the wrong pull down menu so make sure that you are not in rigging not an animation but in modeling so this is a uv editor this is a 2d representation of our 3d model just trying to scoot it over here and as you'll notice when i click on it you're going to get this really interesting grid this grid is basically a just like a basic texture it's just showing you like hey look this if you put a texture that's a bunch of squares you will actually get a bunch of squares on your map so on your 3d model so that's wonderful that's exactly what we want we also see text this text is also very helpful because text and numbers this is very important because it will tell us are my textures upside down this is very important information because if i'm trying to texture something that means this is going to be upside down as well so keep that in mind now i could rotate you know my mesh so it looks straight but at the same time the zero zero is probably up as well so this gives us a little bit of an idea of what the texture is going to look like when we create when we bring in our own over here in the uv editor we have this checker right here we can turn it on and off so you don't have to get blinded by this incredible texture when i turn this off um you'll notice that there is a zero to one zero two one this is considered the uv space you want all of your uvs to be inside the zero to one space if i scroll out you are going to notice that there is a lot of space now this is helpful because that means i can move things around if i need to but right now this is perfect where it is at zero to one this is the default uv set of this cube of any cube now it's a little hard as you'll notice i'm trying to move my windows around so i'm going to close this and instead i'm going to go to my workspace and go to uv editing this is going to help me a lot because my uv editor is going to be right here and my tools called the uv toolkit is available on the right so the purpose of uvs is as we mentioned before that this is a 2d representation of the cube so when i click on a face you'll notice that this face gets highlighted if i click on this face that face gets highlighted so what that tells me is that if i wanted to texture something specifically on this face i have to make sure that i select that i paint something in here what's cool about the uv editor is that you can actually select faces here so if you have no clue where any of this is located you can always click on it again you can right click go to face click on it and then you'll notice that this is at the bottom so there's two ways to find out which face goes to what uv set why is this called uv usually in a graph it's x and y but we already have x and y it's our coordinate system right so if i go to my attribute channels and to my channel blocks we have already x y and z so they couldn't possibly call this x and y so they call it u and v so that's one of the reasons why if i right click on this object in my uv editor and i go to uv i can actually select the uv so each uv represents a vertex however what's interesting is that this vertex here or for example if i grab a vertex and select it you'll notice that it selects two uvs that's because this uv and that uv is actually the same space same thing with edge if i select this edge you'll notice that this edge and this edge actually are the same edge on the 3d model these this outline around the object is called a seam a seam is the place where basically you have to disconnect it or cut it so that it doesn't stretch your texture so this is the best way to show off your textures and unfortunately that means to separate those edges so it is part of uv mapping it's something that you kind of have to keep in mind about when you start uv mapping in a more complicated object but in this case we're going to be okay because this is going to be a crate all right so now that we understand the zero to one space on the uv map let's go ahead and export it we need to take this image or this uv shell and export it into an into a file that we can use so we are going to go up here to our image and we're gonna scroll down and we're going to go to uv snapshot again this is in your uv editor image uv snapshot now this is actually very important there's something that i haven't done yet it is where is this project going to right now usually the default is to go to a default maya scene however i need to set my project or create a project so that we know exactly where this is going to be located now this is something that i hope that in introduction to 3d modeling they taught you if they have not taught you um shame on them but it's really a cardinal rule to be able to create a project folder maya will do this for us thank you maya file project window click new this little button right here and i'm going to call this crate you can call it whatever you like but in this case i'm making a crate so this makes a lot of sense then i'm going to click on this little folder i'm going to look for whoops did not mean to click that i'm going to look for a place to find it i actually have a folder called 3d projects so what i'm going to do is select my 3d projects and then click select so what it's going to do is create a project called crate and then it's going to place it in 3d projects all of this is default accept and let's take a look at what it made going into 3d projects let's go into crate notice that my folders right here crate and then you can see that it's got several folders one of them is called scenes another one is called source images and other one is called images there's a lot more folders but those are the three we really want why is this important well what's going on is that maya really needs to know where is it gonna export files where is it gonna save its files so it has to have a place for everything now you could just have it in one folder and just have all your projects there but if you're creating like hundreds and thousands of pro of assets like i actually have a ton of projects i can't imagine having all of it in one folder so for example my calico character has a set of folders um if i wanted to do a building it would have its own folders this is just a way that is that maya knows exactly where to find its scenes where to find its uvs where to export anything it just knows exactly where to find based on the on the project that you just created so let's go ahead and file save as file save scene as and here's my point you'll notice that it says 3d projects create scenes your maya scenes will always be found in here crate 0 1 underscore start texture start uv and we're in a good place usually maya binary file type there's two there's maya binary which basically works really well with the current maya 2020 in this case ascii files is a little bit bigger file but it can be opened in previous versions so i usually have a tendency to stick to uh maya ascii files and let's take a look at our crate folder whoops great scenes and there you go so anybody that opens up my create folder let's say i zip this up and send it to somebody they will know that my maya files will be found under scenes so going back to this now that we've had a project let's go ahead and export this uv i'm going to go to image uv snapshot just like we did before and this time i'm going to browse and if it doesn't take me to the images folder of my scene for example this is taking me somewhere else just go over here to the left and you can click on images images is usually the area that maya exports any type of files so for example if you're trying to render out an animation it will always put it under images if it's trying to do a uv snapshot for example which is what we're doing here we're going to place it in images so i'm going to call this crate underscore uv snap so again i try to use naming conventions that make a lot of sense because i really want to make sure if anybody opens this file up they will know exactly what this is this is an image of a uv snap of the crate simple to the point um over here in the under image format uh the default is an if which is uh kind of maya's file which i think it's kind of interesting i'm gonna choose a tiff now of course you can use png you can use targas whichever you want but tiff is a really good animation format file size we'll talk about file size but right now i'm going to use 1024 which is a one it's called a 1k map so computers basically read files that are in the powers of two a lot faster than anything else so we try to stick to the powers of two so that's two four sixteen so and so on so on so on when we talk about textures 1k map stands for 1024 so when the industry says okay i just need a 1k map they don't actually mean a thousand pixels what they actually mean is 10 24 10 1024 pixels if they say a 2k map they actually mean 2048 and if they say a there's no 3k you double the number right so if they want a 4k map it's 4096. 4k maps are really high so let's go ahead and do 1024 this is a tiff and apply and close it doesn't look like much happen but what happened let's go baby here if we go into our images you will discover the create uv map and now we are ready for photoshop so let's go ahead and turn on photoshop all right i've opened up the file in photoshop and here we have our map right now it's in layer 0. can't see anything i'm going to create a new layer at the bottom right by click on this little piece of paper and drag in this new layer down below and i'm going to fill it with black so right now my top swatch is black i'm going to do a shift backspace i'm all about shortcuts make sure this says foreground click ok and now i have my black background and my uv snap i'm going to go ahead and call my layer want zero in this case uv snap because i don't want to get confused and we are ready to kind of explore what this does now the last thing i want to do is accidentally paint on my uv snap so i'm going to click on this little lock that means that this layer is locked and i can't paint on it which is ideal let's go ahead and create another layer this is going to be the one that i'm going to bring in i'm going to grab a paintbrush choose a color and i'm just going to make a random shape like a smiley face um and maybe somewhere else i'll make a frowny face this is outside the uv space anything that happens inside the uv space you'll be able to see anything outside the uv space you will not be able to see and therefore is considered a waste of memory and data so don't i'm just going to show you as an example that here's an angry face outside of the uv space and use a happy face and just for fun because after all we're texturing here let's create some cute little icons here just to kind of demonstrate the the whole thing now we don't want to save over this crate uv snap i'm going to go to file save as and i'm going to call this crate clr which stands for color usually you have we're creating today is a color map so we want to make sure that people can it's just the basic color map we are going to change this into a psd because it's a working file and i'm going to keep my layers so create color and this is a photoshop file save click ok and let's see what happens in maya i'm basically done with this i'm going to go back to my maya classic press f to focus and i'm going to assign a new material now just to let you guys know this has already a material and it's called lambert one you never want to touch lambert1 lambor1 is the default gray if i change might and i'm just going to demonstrate what not to do if i change this to let's say like let's say yellow any object that i create from now on will have that yellow which is really bad you don't want that and what you want to do is assign a new shader to it so this is called a shader it's a sphere that you can kind of see the texture on it these are the attributes and if you don't see them press ctrl a so that you can see the attributes you'll see the cube the cube shape an initial group and a lambert so what i'm going to do is assign a new material to it i'm going to right click on it and then select all the way to the bottom there's something that says assign new material so one more time this needs to be in object mode right click assign a new material there are several choices you can use maya 2020 uses what's called arnold arnold is a type of renderer and it also has a bunch of shaders we are going to be using the basic one which is called the ai standard surface it's a long name but basically it's the standard surface it's a shader for every surface so go ahead and click on ai standard surface so over here we have our ai standard surface which now i'm going to call crate shader i should probably spell it correctly there we go and you'll notice that there's a bunch of attributes underneath this we are just going to be focusing on the base and maybe a little bit of specularity but right now let's focus on the base so the first one is the weight the weight just means how much of that texture do you want to see the second one is the color what color do you want this to be so if i select the color and i change it to that yellow that we chose earlier you'll notice that it changes which is great if i want to change it to something else i'm more than welcome to choose whatever color solid color i want now this weight means that i only see eighty percent of that texture if i want to crank it all the way to one we'll see a hundred percent of that color and the purpose is just to give you control instead of going back into photoshop and changing the color over and over and over if you're trying to make something darker you can just grab the weight and that will make it darker think so let's pretend you have a whole environment and there is a lamp and the lamp just seems to be really bright and you just don't know why and it's just not working with you you can always take the the weight and just kind of reduce it to make it darker things like that okay so why are we doing this well let's go to color and we're going to click on this little checker right here which is basically a connection and we're going to click on that little tiny checker and it's going to give us a list of nodes to play with we are looking for file because we have a file that we want to attach it so i'm going to go to file and then it gives you a file tab which is basically a file node and over here you'll see image name you're going to click on that tiny little folder and notice where we're located we're located in create source images maya will always look for textures first in source images now this is where i put my final images my working file is located under images so clicking up on that blue little arrow which will take you up the folder uber can go into images and here is my click crate color psd i'm going to double click on that and you're going to see that nothing's really happened well you have to press on the number 6 on your keyboard your mouse has to be hovering over the perspective window and press the number six looks black but if i turn around there it is my smiley face is upside down and there is my other my other texture so the good news is is that it's working unfortunately this is upside down but that's okay i at least now i understand that it's upside down and i'll be able to fix it in the texture so now that we know how to attach a texture to it i am going to save file 16 s because i'm worried that something horrible is going to happen i'm going to say version 2 and i am going to call this start texture okay great so you can see in my uvs which should really need to hide but right now at least it's working so again press the number six so four just means wireframe five means shaded six means texture if you look up here at the top you can see when i click five that little texture disappears it textures so that's kind of like the shortcut all right i think that's a good place to stop we have explored uv snapshots and also painted it in photoshop in the next tutorial we're gonna take our abstract guard here and create it into something more realistic like a wood barrel so you can go ahead and start painting it and make it stylized but if you want to make it photoreal that is going to be in the next tutorial where we're going to create a photorealistic wood crate so thank you so much for watching and let me know if you guys have any questions by leaving a comment below and also don't forget to like and share i would really appreciate it 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Channel: Academic Phoenix Plus

Views: 43,079

Keywords: Autodesk Maya (Award-Winning Work), Texture Mapping, MAYA-1, uv, uv layout, texture, shaders, uv snapshot, snapshot, Adobe Photoshop (Software), export, Intro, Animation, Cartoon, Animated, Introduction, Cartoons, videos, New, asset, cg texture, autodesk maya, maya 2020, how to, introduction texture, texture basics, maya basics, intro maya, texture photoshop, video tutorial

Id: zPinIjj_F8s

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020