Texturing in Maya

Assigning materials

Texturing a model is simple really. You apply UV mappings to faces and then position the UVs on your texture image.

Sometimes your texture will be done for you. Perhaps you found a good reference image and used Photoshop to lay out various parts of it. Or maybe - as in this case - another modder sent you a skin to use. Other times you'll start from scratch and will create a UV map file that your skinner can use to make the skin - or you'll do the skin yourself.

First up we'll look at the case where the skin is made. Later on we'll see what to do to start from scratch. Here's the gun untextured and textured. The image on the right is what we'll be aiming for.

Pre- and post-texturing

A useful tip when doing this stuff is to tear off the perspective viewport and open up the UV Texture Editor in separate windows. Having both open at the same time is very handy, especially if you uncheck Attach to main window from the window's icon menu. You will be able to have both windows available at a usable size without trying to cram them into panels in the main window. Furthermore you will be able to see other windows (like this page) behind them!

Now let's load in the texture file we're going to use. To do that we must apply a new material to the gun. Select the raygun (not the sight) in object selection mode (hotkey: F8). Right click and open the Materials menu. Choose Assign New Material / Lambert. This window pops up:

Picking a new material

If you want, give the material a more interesting name than lambertX. To apply a texture, click the checkerbox to the right of Color (I've highlighted it in red):

Select a file texture

Now click the file button under 2D Textures:

Selecting the file image

Under Image Name, browse for the raygun.bmp image from the Zip you downloaded earlier.

You should see the image tiled in the UV Texture Editor when the raygun is selected. The next step is to apply projection mappings to faces of the gun.

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