Creating Textures For Characters In Maya

[pspeakes]

I've been working with Maya for a while, and have gotten comfortable enough with modeling characters that I want to start texturing them. Normally, I just click the faces of the mesh and assign texture files, and I know this is wrong, and I never get good results from it. I know about using the Texture Editor to properly wrap textures to a polygonal mesh, but my real concern is the Photoshop file you use that actually contains the different textures. How does one go about making a proper texture file, that will successfully wrap? Does anyone know a good tutorial out there that explains this?

Additionally, is it better to have the texture made before you begin modeling, or is it better to have it made after the modeling when you've already unwrapped the UV's in the texture editor. I would assume the latter, but I could be wrong, as I've stated I really dont know anything about texturing.

Thanks.

[user_deleted]

you're on the right track. personally i take a snapshot of the uv's and use that as a template in photoshop. it helps using the maya paint tools to lay down a few guides first, just to see if you're going to get extreme squashing or tearing in areas and where you might have to relax cv's. you can also check placement of eyebrows etc. in the view which helps. in photoshop there isn't any great shortcut, but it does help to start with real world textures, google image search is a bonus here as are :

http://www.everystockphoto.com/
http://www.turtletextures.com/
http://www.mayang.com/ (though this seems to be missing urk)

there's quite a bit of back and forth, since texturing and lighting are linked together like that face sucker from alien and it's victim, so keep a layered file somewhere. Once you've generated your diffuse map you can often create specular and bump maps using a combination of single channel/contrast/highpass etc.

i can't help you for tutorials but i've seen a flash ad on the top of this site that advertised texturing and modeling dvd's, it's probably still in the store section.