David Johnson over at DJX posts a new script he created for handling UV Layouts of PaintFX leaves in Maya… pretty specific thing, but actually quite useful when you need to make grass and trees in large numbers in Maya starting with PaintFX.
“Maya’s paintFX can be used to make trees which can be converted to polygons with leaves that consist of just a few polys per leaf. Texture maps (color, opacity, bump etc) are then applied. The default output from the paintFX conversion has each leaf mapped to fill the standard uv quadrant, so each leaf gets a copy of the texture. This can look pretty good, but the repetition is usually very obvious. You could break the leaf mesh into a few parts and assign variations of the leaf textures to each part. But a more efficient way is to layout the uv’s so that groups of leaves are mapped to different parts of the uv quadrant in a 4×4 tiled patternfor example. Then you can make a texture map with leaf variations arranged in the same 4×4 tile pattern. Now you can have 16 different looking leaves on the tree, almost as easily as you can have one.”
