From the course: Maya: Advanced Texturing

To UV or not to UV? - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Advanced Texturing

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To UV or not to UV?

- [Instructor] So with all this talk on painting textures with UVs, is there a way to paint textures by hand, on an object, without them? Well, actually there is. It's called PTEX. It's a UV-less way of creating textures for your model. It was created for Disney, but it's not widely used by all render engines today, and it's not used at all in video games. Hopefully, they will get that fixed in the future, but as of right now, I'm just gonna kinda show you what it is, and how I like to use it in my work flow. Here in 0204 Start, and we're in Mudbox with a particular object. And I'm gonna select that object and just show you in the UVs that there are no UVs on this particular object at this point. Now, I do want to start painting textures. So let's say, I'm just trying to very, very quickly sketch in some stuff so that I can get it approved by my lead, and I want to just be able to do that without having to take this model, and make it low-res, retopologize it. I just wanna go ahead and get the texturing process started just for approvals. So, I can go down to my paint tools and choose my paint brush, and click on this particular object. Now, here in Mudbox, it's going to say, no texture coordinates, what do you wanna do? So I can either have Mudbox create UVs, or I can prepare the mesh for PTEX painting, which is what I want to do. So, what it's gonna do is it's going to give me a bunch of menu boxes here to explain how PTEX actually works, which I'm just going to close and come over here. So we get this odd, grid texture that is gonna go across your entire object, and I'm gonna zoom in to this. And what we're looking for is how clean and crisp these squares are. You'll also notice, over on the left hand side, that the current resolution says, about six million texels, better than a 2.4K by 2.4K texture. So we're actually getting a texture resolution that on this particular object would be better than a 2K map. Now, you can increase or decrease this depending on what resources your computer can handle. So we could come over here and hit decrease. Now we're down to five million texels. We could hit decrease again, see if we could get that any smaller, and it is trying. Or, you could come over here and increase, and now we're at 23 million texels, and it's better than a 4.8K texture. Honestly, I'm gonna drop back down here to five million. This should be enough. Now, as soon as you get that texture resolution where you want, you're just gonna hit Done. We'll let it run through a little bit of options. It does actually create these UVs that you don't actually see or use, but you will get a message that says the mesh is now prepared for PTEX painting. After that, honestly, in Mudbox, you will paint this object just like you would anything else. We could come in with our paintbrush, give ourselves a nice color, and come in here and start painting. So, we're going to paint a new paint layer for the diffuse, and it'll be a PTEX file. We will change that over to 16 bits, and you'll see it kind of flash through, and I can now come through and start painting directly on here. Now, how good is the resolution? As we go through, we can choose some different stamps here, and click on that, kinda zoom in and see, and see that it is actually giving us a pretty decent resolution as we go through. Now, with this PTEX texturing, you will notice that it constantly is updating, 'cause it's trying to maximize and optimize the workflow inside this render engine in Mudbox. We could also go over to our stencil. We'll choose a brick pattern here, and we'll put our brick right on the back of his neck. And switch over to our projection brush, and we could paint that in. Again, we're not really painting this, but I do want to show you just the texture resolution that you get with this PTEX. So, we'll hit Q to hide that, and kinda zoom in and see that you can see those bricks look just like they did in the texture. So it gives us a way to quickly, without UVs, start the painting process on your object for you to be able to get approvals on it. And that's honestly where I use PTEX for, when I'm working with it. Now, there are some render engines that allow for it. Disney is still in production of PTEX, and it's still using it internally. So, honestly, I am hoping that more render engines take hold of this way of texturing, so that you can actually just skip the UVs entirely, and not have to worry about them. If we could get them into video games, that would be even better. With a lot less work on the front end of having to make sure your UVs are optimized, and where that's going. It allows for that artistry of just being able to model your character and just jump right in with your paintbrush, and starting painting, to happen. So again, PTEX is a UV-less way of working. It's not widely used across all industries yet, but it is definitely worth taking a look at, especially in the early approval process of your workflow.

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