Day 124

Now that I have my models done, it's onto texturing. First up, is the room I made awhile ago. So just as a review of how textures work, my goal is to take a 2-D image and place it on a 3-D object. For that to work, I need a map to tell where the 2-D image needs to go onto the 3-D object. The first step is to make this map. It's sort of like taking the 3-D object and unfolding it flat. So I start out with just the room itself. Maya can try to automatically unfold it itself and I end up with something like the upper left. Unfortunately it's broken up too much and some pieces are overlapping. So I move parts around and attach pieces that should go together until I get something like the above right. 

I applied this checker board pattern as a sort of test pattern. I want to see that they are all squares and there's no distortion. I also want to make sure that the squares are the same size everywhere. 

The room was simple but the furniture is a little more complex. Above is what I got after unfolding and rearranging all the pieces. So why am I doing all of this? Like I said before, these are like maps. I'm going to take this map and import it into Photoshop. There I'll apply the textures (what I want the objects to actually look like) directly over the map. Then I'll take the texture, import it into Maya, attach it to my object and the object should finally look like something instead of being gray. If that doesn't make sense, just wait awhile when I actually do that part.