Removing Texture Seams in Maya 7+
using the 3d Paint Tool or Transfer Maps
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Introduction:
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One of the most troublesome challenges to the texturing process has long been the way in which we deal with UV seams.
However hard we may try to lay out UV's as efficiently and seamlessly as possible, we are still inevitably left with seams.
Fortunately for us, there are at least a couple of options for removing these seams in Maya!
- We may use the 3d paint tool to paint over seams within Maya
- We may use Transfer Maps* and fix the seams within Photoshop
*(Surface Sampler was renamed to Transfer Maps in Maya 8.0+)
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(Page 1 of 2)
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The 3d Paint Tool is perhaps the most intuitive method for removing texture seams.
If you ever get lost or are curious about some of its other features, check the help.
Overall Time: usually < 5 minutes
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We start off with our texture that has not yet been retouched.
So we'll open the Hypershade and create a shader, filling the color channel with the file texture we've prepared.
We can apply the shader by middle mouse dragging and dropping it onto our object.
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At this point we are able to see the seams that we aim to remove. (If it's hard to tell where the seams are, you may want to turn on Texture Border display)
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Now we'll select our object, switch to the Rendering menuset and choose the 3d Paint Tool which is found in the Texturing menu.
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There are probably 2 main settings you'll use with this tool to remove seams: Paint and Clone. These are found in the Paint Operations rollout of the 3d Paint Tool's settings.
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For Painting, we'll first select the eyedropper icon and pick a color from the current texture that we want to use.
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Then adjust the opacity and simply paint it on at the seams.
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Now we can just brush over the seams until they disappear
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As you can see at the left, this results in a loss of detail for a lot of textures, so we may want to explore the Clone option instead.
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Just select the Clone option in the Paint Operations rollout and click Set Clone Source.
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Much like the clone stamp tool in most 2d apps, you now pick a source point and begin cloning out the seam areas.
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This works to preserve some of our very noisy irregular detail on this particular texture, so we can click Save Textures in the File textures rollout and retrieve it from [project]/3dPaintTextures/[scene]
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There are many times, however, when the 3d paint tool is not an appropriate tool to use on a particular seam. Delicate patterns, logos, or other such details for example.
So we'll talk about an alternative solution to this problem on the next page.
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