Chapter 4: UV Mapping: Tutorial: UV Mapping the Sword At this point in the process the UV mapping is done and youÕre ready to create the actual texture map to place on the model. This book isnÕt going to cover how to create texture maps. That would be an entire volumeÕs worth of information unto itself. I can recommend that you look into books on one of the many professional 2D art packages out there. Knowing one of them is an excellent, if not essential addition to your digital art knowledge, anyway. Briefly, though, hereÕs the reason you lay out the UVs in the texture space and take a screen capture of it. The UV mapping tells Maya where to put certain parts of an image (texture, skin, etc). Open the picture of your UV mapping in a 2D art program, and use it as a guide for creating the texture map; for example, put the face of the character over where the UVs for the face polygons are. Then, when you tell Maya to use the image file you create as the texture map, the different parts of your image will be mapped to the correct parts of the model; you already told them where to go when you unwrapped the UVs! IÕm going to gloss over the actual creation of the texture map and jump right up to the point where it is done and youÕre ready to apply it to the model. To apply an image as a texture map to any geometry you need to assign a file texture to the color channel of the material that is assigned to that object. The steps to do this are detailed below. · Bring up the Hypershade. · Double click on the material that you want to apply the texture file to. This will cause the Attribute Editor to be displayed. · In the Attribute Editor you will see a color attribute. On the far right of the color attribute you will see the Create Render Node button. It will look like it has a small portion of a black and white checker board on it. · Click the Create Render Node button. This will bring up the Create Render Node window. In the Textures tab in the 2D Textures rollout click on the file button. This will create a file texture node and connect it to the color attribute of the material node. It will also select the file texture node so that you can assign it a file to display. · With the file texture still selected go to the Attribute Editor. Click on the browse button next to the image name attribute. This will open a file selection window and place you in the sourceimages directory of the current project (which, coincidentally, is where you should place your texture maps by default). Select the file that you want to be applied. · If the material is not assigned to the geometry, do that now. Viola! Now when you go into hardware shading mode youÕll see the texture map on the surface of the geometry.