Thanks. I been playing with it here at work and have been actually adding a layer then painting it in PS. It then carries over to Maya from the file. Didn't know about using the lambert shader. I had tried other ones before.
You explained it very well as for just painting. How would I go about applying say a brick texture to specific areas of the wall?
If you got some other stuff to do this is not urgent.
Thanks again.

well as u UV map u will flattern stuff until u get something like this



then you import that image into photoshop and build up the layers like so.



just place the differnet texture parts over the right places.

i think thats what u want.

I kind of see what you mean. Take that wall for instance. If I use the Auto it lays each face out flat. If I use Planar it doesn't do that. I must be doing something wrong.

Are you using the PS Transformation tool to resize, rotate the texture layers you have in the pic?

hmmm.... im not sure on your photoshop level. what i do with a simple model like that is create a good base texture on a new layer. like that lightish grey metal. then i use various selection tools the trace certain parts of the UV map i imported (which is the bottom layer). then, while on the base metal texture i made, i press Ctrl + J to copy and paste the selected area to the layer above.

From here i can add (poor) edge scratch by accessing the layer functions and then adding an Inner Glow. crank up the noise and change the colour from that awful pale yellow to white or grey.

I add detail like scratches after on new layer... a simple skin like this would have about 20 layers.

there are many techniques to make skins but my skins are pretty nice considering i use no imported textures. Do what your most comfortable with though

//EDIT

planar mapping takes anything in a direction and "squishes" it. doing it like this means you get alot of faces together so your UV map is easy and looks better.

edited on Jan. 5, 2006 07:28 am by Janova

It looks like the texturing is more complicated than the modeling part.
I am using PS CS2 by the way.
Something else I did see is that if you go into Face mode that you would only see those faces in the UV Texture Editor.

Lets take a simple box for instance. If you use the Planar then go into the UV Texture Editor all you see is one surface.
In Automatic mapping you see all sides of the box.
Say you want to put different textures on each side of the box.
How do you do that if you can only see one side of the box in the Texture Editor?

well your dont UV at the same time... u select all the faces u want in the planer map and "UV" them... then u select the next lot and do them... move them around in the UV window till they are satisfactory positions... so they dont over lap etc. you dont ever use just 1 of the texture mapping methods... u use a combination.

I posted up another pic in the gallery. Managed through trial and error to get different brick textures on all 6 faces of the block. I learned quite a bit about the UV Texture editor since last night. Now all I got to do is reproduce what I did today. hehe
Well, back to work.

Question Janova. I beleive you had said something about just using polygons for games. Does that mean you cannot use the loft function in the building process?
Thanks

hey red i use maya but i cant really teach it, one thing is that automatic UV mapping is crap its always better to do it yourself and lay it out in a sensible manner. you can then stitch UV coords to make it better. entirely symmetric objects may have the UV coords piled ontop of each other to reduce texture size, an important consideration in games because the videocard only fits so many into its memory at once. POLY-GONs are N-sided, many games require you to use TRIANGLES, 3-sides only. [poly=many, gon=angle, its greek ;)] you can use the cleanup options to remove 0 length and invalid geometry, also to tesselate the polygon surfaces into triangles before you export it. the loft function is for NURBS, non rational b-splines so you cannot use this for any game that i know of to date. unless doom3 or something uses nurbs in some way, i dunno i havent looked at what the new engines are doing lately. nurbs are dynamically scalable geometry so depending upon how close you are to the rendering camera it will become more or less dense. the problem with using nurbs is #1 it sucks to texture them because they have special parameterizations #2 its *very* hard to create a seamless surface across multiple geometries with them for that same reason and #3 they more often than not will BREAK when animating across such surfaces. polygons are more straightforward. -- for people that dont use maya and want something free, forget milkshape try blender its a very professional open source and extensible environment. maya is probably NOT the best thing to use for working with polygons anyway, many people prefer 3ds for that.