Dollshouse texturing, UV mapping, UV texture editor

The dolls house texturing is finished!!!!

Wow - what a learning experience with UV mapping; which I have to say I really enjoyed, once I broke through the pain barrier!
I spent yesterday tidying up the layers in Outliner and naming them, so it was easy to see what was what...
And made sure there was no duplication of the topology....
All looks good and I also learnt the difference between Blinn (a level of shine to a material's appearance) and Lambert (matt material)....
so the outer walls of the Dollshouse had a Blinn finish, to show the plastic effect, and the interior walls had a Lambert material....the textures (wallpaper) were applied in the UV texture editor - which came into its own, when selecting multiple faces to change to a Blinn material....

Here's a few render shots of the final look....I quickly created one direction light, which points straight at the dolls house, to simulate sunlight...it's a rough mash up for now, just to make sure that the textures all come out in the render....really looking forward to seeing it once it's lit properly!

Maya interface, showing the model area, hypershader, UV texture editor and the render view.....the workspace is pretty busy....time to get a second monitor at home I think (haha)

UV Mapping - new understanding!!!

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!!!