Last time I showed an example of how to generate UVs for a nurb-to-poly object by using the chicken’s head as an example. I did it that way because I was having hard time working with Maya’s UV tools. Maya does some strange things with the way it does its cylinder mapping, and I ended up laying out the UVs for the head pretty much by hand.

Manual creation of UV’s.

I thought I would try some of Maya’s tools to see if I could get better results. I duplicated the head and worked on a copy. First I selected the vertices at the top of the duplicated head and at the base of the neck. Then I did a Polygon Average Vertices operation to get this:

Average Vertices

This will give it a little less stretching with the texture map at ends of the model when I create a projection map. Then I created a cylindrical texture map and gave it a 360-degree sweep. Now here is where Maya gets freaky. Here is the result that I got:

Wacked out UVs

The UVs don’t seem to have a seam at the back. But if I change the value of the projection map’s rotate Y attribute to .1 the UV’s snap into place.

Better UVs

Then I "fixed" the UVs on the inside of the eye sockets where they overlap and lined up the edges by selecting and moving the UVs. Next I normalized the UVs to make them fit within 0 to 1 texture space and transferred them back to the original head.:

New UV map applied to original head.

This way is a lot faster and I got better results. There also seems to be a bug with the UVs scrambling themselves. There was a thread about this on the Highend3D mailing list and I think it was Byan Ewert who posted this fix:

Run this before you save the file or export the mesh. This is for Maya v3, I haven’t used Maya v4 enough to see if there still is a problem.