AuthorTopic: How to achieve seamless low res textures in Maya?  (Read 10081 times)

Offline MegaLeon

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How to achieve seamless low res textures in Maya?

on: March 01, 2011, 02:14:20 pm
Hi guys
I've been messing a while with low poly stuff in Maya but I can't seem to get the precision I want with low resolution textures.

Going back to basics, I've tried creating a cube with a simple UV:

Everything looks fine in the viewport, and geometry-wise it should work as well, as the UVs are aligned in a 8*8 grid and the texture is 32*32.

However, the render is screwed up.


Has anyone any clue on how to get clean textured models when the UVs are squeezed up due to space restraints?
« Last Edit: March 02, 2011, 08:57:41 am by MegaLeon »

Offline ndchristie

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Re: How to achieve seamless low res textures in Maya?

Reply #1 on: March 04, 2011, 03:13:25 am
I've never had this particular problem, but I have had some things like it.

May I see your exact UV coords, your material rendering properties, and may I ask what you're using to render this?

Those half-pixel cuts suggest a very simple problem: that you're snapped to the center of the pixel, and not the border, resulting in something like this:
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Offline Dusty

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Re: How to achieve seamless low res textures in Maya?

Reply #2 on: March 04, 2011, 03:33:29 am
I don't know about Maya but in 3dsmax it has a similar system where you can drag the cropping methods around over the texture. It's not very accurate at all for lower resolutions, which causes seams like that. The problem is that when you drag around the lines and such in the tool they provide it doesn't round it off or anything like that, giving you very large floating values, which is bad for low-resolution textures since it has a huge effect, as you can see. The values need to be very clean.

If you can, input the numbers manually, it's a lot of work which requires minimal math and a calculate, but will crop off that stuff perfectly. What it wants is a multiplier value, a value from 0-1 which basically represents 0-100%.

You can find these values by dividing some variable values by the total width(or height) of the image. So say you want to find the U value(the position to start cropping horizontally) of your texture cropping. So if you have a texture image with a size of 128x128 pixels, and you want it to start cropping at 16 horizontally, you divide 16/128=0.125. 0.125 is your U value. For getting the W(width) value of the cropping, simply take the width of the crop you want and divide it again, by the image width. So if you want to crop out a 32pixel width, 32/128=0.25. This applies to the V and H as well by substituting with vertical and height values.

So for example, in your texture the values you'd want to input for the top-left texture is:
U: 0
V: 0
W: .5
H: .5

For the top-right it would be:
U: .5
V: 0
W: .5
H: .5

However, I am kind of a novice at 3D work. This is what I learned when I was working with Minecraft mob textures and it's the method I used. I also use 3DS Max so it may not be the same in Maya. Someone more experienced may point out my flaws but if I'm teaching a crude method I hope they do. My methods may just be arising from the poor method in 3DS max, and Maya may support it much better and easily allow you to snap to cleaner values with a hotkey or something(3DS doesn't even let you zoom in, so that just makes it all the more harder).
« Last Edit: March 04, 2011, 03:37:30 am by Dusty »

Offline Martyr

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Re: How to achieve seamless low res textures in Maya?

Reply #3 on: March 04, 2011, 01:04:47 pm
Could be mipmapping or just the renderer being a dick. Try having a couple of pixels between every square and map the faces separately (or just detach all the uv faces and scale them down).

Why would you want to "render" it anyway? For low-res stuff it's usually better to just use screengrabs.

Offline MegaLeon

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Re: How to achieve seamless low res textures in Maya?

Reply #4 on: March 09, 2011, 01:06:10 pm
I fixed this using the Pixel Snap (the magnet icon in maya uv window in the upper left, near show grid) instead of the grid snap :) Thanks everyone!

Offline Lazy Brain Games

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Re: How to achieve seamless low res textures in Maya?

Reply #5 on: March 13, 2011, 02:07:11 am
I'm not sure if this will be of any help, since I'm not a modeler, but I do use a seamless tiling program called "Filter Forge" to assist in tilesets. It's original function is for seamless textures for 3d models though. Here's a link...

http://filterforge.com/

Have a good one!

-Johnny B.

Offline thedaemon

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Re: How to achieve seamless low res textures in Maya?

Reply #6 on: March 31, 2011, 09:07:54 am
Pad in between the different colors. If they are connected they can bleed with texture filtering.
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Offline OriginalAdric

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Re: How to achieve seamless low res textures in Maya?

Reply #7 on: May 06, 2011, 06:54:01 pm
ndchristie is pretty close to the answer. Maya's a little funny on how it calculates UVs, based on which renderer you use (maya software vs. mental ray). Basically, one of the two calculates from the pixel edges, and the other calculates from the pixel centers, tho I can't remember which one does what. In the pixel snapping options, try switching between Center and Edge modes, and you should fix it quickly enough.