Subtitles of the Movie

Now in the final stage of our production I'm going to show you how to create a UV Snapshot within Maya so that you can import into Photoshop and begin painting your Texture Map. Go ahead and open up the weaponUVs.ma file. It's in your scenes folder; this way we're looking at the same model at the same time. And what you'll see is the finished weapon. In the UV Editor you can see how I've laid out all of the UVs for this object. You can always go to Polygons and Layout. Once again the Layout will lay out all of your Shells within the 0 to 1 square, and then you simply need to move them into position. Sometimes you may need to scale slightly, so it's always important to keep your checkerMap on and take a close look at your object to see if there are any major differences. For example, the handle has slightly larger checkers than the rest of the rifle. So does the bullet cartridge and the gun handle, but that's quite alright because it's such a small difference you won't notice. And that is what is known as Tensile Density, keeping your checkers approximately the same size to one another. So now with the rifle complete I'll select on the objects and in my UV Editor I'll go Polygons, UV Snapshot. Within the dialog box it will automatically default into my Work Files folder under images. I currently have a size of 1024 by 1024, which I'll keep for this project. I'll be exporting out as a TIFF file and the range will be in the zero to 1 box within our UV Editor. I'll say OK, and I'll go to Photoshop. I will open my images folder and find the outUV.tif and open that up in Photoshop and here's my blueprint. Now, a few things to keep in mind is that this image tends to sometimes come in with an Alpha Map Channel, so you'll want to discard that. I also prefer to have black lines on a white background so I'll say Image, Invert. Sometimes I prefer to darken in my lines. I could use the Brightness-Contrast, or you can just duplicate your layer, turn it to a multiply, and then flatten the image. I'll duplicate that layer once again and I'll turn my background into a color that represents the gun, such as a blue-gray, and I will fill in the background layer with that color. I'll select on my Grid, turn that to Multiply and now I can go ahead and save out this map in my Source Images folder, and I will call this weaponMap. I prefer to save my files as TIFF files, depending on the game engine. You may need to save in a different format. I'll also save out my Layer file in my Images folder. Once again give it a unique name like weaponOriginal. Now, back in Maya I will create a Shader now for my rifle. In my Hypershade I'll create a Lambert Shader, select File and my folder, select my weaponMap.tif image, and select my objects of the weapon, right-click and choose Assign Material to Selection. I currently have my Wireframe turned On so I'll go to Shading, Wireframe, Unshaded, and turn that off so that now I can actually view my weapon all with the Texture Map. This gives me the opportunity to view the weapon up close and look for any serious stretching that may be happening in certain areas, such as here, and then I have to determine if that's something that requires fixing in the UVs, or if it's something that we can get away with. For the most part the weapon is very clean, so now back in Photoshop we now have our UV Set to use as a Grid to begin painting our Texture Map. I'll be covering how to create hand-painted textures in the next chapter.