Monkey See, monkey kills : Do’s, don’ts and why your character is now a potato

Texture mapping

One of the main reasons to map textures is, to precisely assign the texture to the mesh so that the project can be visualized from other devices and without having to add them every time. Usually, I would create new materials and assign them in the UV Editor, but because this particular model already has its textures mapped (map1), I only updated the colours in the Attributes Editor. Although, there is an important step to keep in mind.

• DO = always check if your character textures are mapped;

• don’t = add textures to the attributes editor without first checking if your character is mapped.

project setting

Before I can even start thinking about animating a character, I have to make sure that I have everything in place, and mostly, that stays there. With this I mean that I have to ‘tell’ Maya to remember where the assets I will be needing are and to use and follow always that same path. For instance, I had to set up the relative path in the Project Window and make sure to add my assets in the correct folders. In this project, I moved all my texture files to Maya’s new folder I just created from the project and added them in their relative folder named ‘sourceimages’. I also wanted to add a soundtrack to play in real time (yep, you guessed it, Stayin’Alive, right?) and I had to move it to the folder ‘sound’ inside of the new folder I created.