maya & avatar obj file

I imported the SL_avatar_OBJ.obj file and it turns out to be one big mesh. the Hypershade editor is displaying different shaders for head, upper body and lower body. when i look into my UV texture editor is displaying all three body parts in one texture it seems..quiet a mess to look at and unworkable.

how do i make it so that the obj file is displayed or divided in the right way (head, upper body and lower body)????

greetings
Moyra Ares

I ended up retrofitting the UV layout manually. I slapped one of the available avatar texturing templates onto the mesh as a guideline (it's then displayed as a background texture in the UV editor) and shoved all the UV coordinates to their correct places. There might a more clever way to do that, but I'm not aware of it.

If you end up having to do the same: the "select connected faces" command (or similar, I can't check the wording in Maya right now) in the UV editor is your friend. It's just a 2 hours of work or so if you use that tool.

Cheers,
-L

Take a look at the outliner. You should see all three UV sets as independent items. Just select the one you want to work with.

The fact that all three overlap when you select the whole model is exactly how it's supposed to work. If you think about it logically, it makes sense. When you select the whole model, you're selecting three different UV sets at once, each of which exist in the same area of their respective canvases. So of course they appear to overlap. If you select other multiple objects at once, the same thing will happen.

Thank you so far for answering, i am glad you replied.

When it is completely normal that i only have to add the appropriate texture files into the material shader.... which i did.....than it should look perfectly when i render it.

But it does not...as an example here is a test rendering

http://www.butterfliesandangels.com/picserver/testrender.png

can somebody please explain why maya is rendering it like this? and what solution is there to get it nice and smooth?

moyra

You need to unlock the normals, and then soften them. When polygons render checkerboarded like that, it's a sign that the normals are locked at incorrect angles.

Depending on what version of Maya you're using, the instructions will vary slightly. In Maya 2008, there's a Normals menu in the Polygons section. In older versions, if I remember correctly, there was a Normals submenu under the Edit Polygons menu, again in the Polygons section.

If you're not sure where to find the option in your particular version, look up "unlock normals" in Help. Maya's Help is fantastic.

You'll find, by the way, that while you'll want most normals to be soft, it's best to have some of them be hard. For example, on a real human face, there's a hard crease where the nostril meets the cheek. The line of poly edges there will benefit from hard normals. Also, choice hard normals will help bring out the eyes and the lips. It's a bit of a pain to do well with the mesh we've got, since whoever created it wasn't too sensible about edge loops, but if you play with it, you can get some good results.

If you really want to get fancy, you can create a higher resolution mesh, tweak it for more realistic detail, and then use it to create a normal map for baking textures onto the low res one. You could create some really good shading that way. It's a lot of work if you've never done it before, but it's an important skill, well worth learning how to do.

thank you so much..this was really helpful
it looks much better now and im looking forward to experiment a little bit

ta
Moyra