UV Mapping breakthrough!!!!!
So, what was taking me about 8 hours (no joke) to UV map one room, floor etc has now been reduced to 10 minutes!!!
And, the rotation Axis when trying to 3D orbit the model, sometimes was far away, so everytime I tried to rotate, the model would whizz off the screen. Before smashing the screen to pieces I found a forum, full of exasperated modelers screaming obscenities at Maya.....hahaha...
Turns out I just needed to hover my mouse over the object and hit 'F' key.....lol
Ha! Maya....I'm getting to know you!
I followed the tutorials given to us by Sang plus the youtube link below...and really began to get my head around the UV texturing process in Maya...
A few images below showing the various stages...
Applying a checkerboard, including numbers, so I could see the orientation of the UV map elements, when they are placed into the 0-1 space.
Then taking a UV snapshot, saving as a .png file and sending to photoshop.
Then, in Photoshop, opening that .png file and placing textures (in this case 'cream plastic' and 'twee wallpaper' in a layer underneath the .png UV snapshot.)
I can then scale and tile the textured images so that they cover the area of the relevant UV map.
Then I save that out as a .tiff file and open Maya.
Then, with my UV Texture editor open, I select the objects (double checking that all pieces are visible in the UVTE) and apply a lambert material.
In Maya I then assign my .tiff file to that lambert material and it worked!!!
