UV mapping is the process of generating a flat representation of a 3d dimensional geometry. This UV map can be represented by UV coordinates which are also known as texture coordinates. Since it’s 2d, the two parameters it are U for the X-axis and V for the Y-axis.
Applying textures – right click assign material (either existing or new material)
Creating materials – edit from hypershade
Maya’s UV editor – interface to edit UVs if needed, auto unwrap works most of the time.
Demo example: Earth and Moon
Reflections
As most of the modeling work will be done in Maya, the next step will be to UV wrap them. Having proper UV maps is very important to ensure the textures does not appear in the wrong places of the model. For the class activity, we are tasked to texture two different spheres with the earth and moon’s texture from online sources. The task was pretty straightforward as when unwrapping a UV sphere the projection is already the same as the geographic projection of the images (Mercator Projection being the most popular for maps). All we have to do was to auto unwrap and apply the textures with a standard material in Maya. I look forward to further texture lessons.