How do I preserve the aspect ratio of the textures

[bflat]

What if I want to bring in a picture that I've done in photoshop that's in the 16:9 aspect ratio. When I make a poly plane in Maya, and attach the texture, the texture stretches to fit the plane. So there goes my 16:9 aspect ratio, and I end up having to eyeball it to the right size. How can I bring in textures that keep their aspect ratio?

[empleh]

make the plane have a 16:9 aspect ratio also.

ww

[bflat]

Yeah, sorry, I was mostly using that for an example. I mean I have to bring in lots of images at odd shapes and ratios, and I don't want to have to shape them all in Maya. Please, just isn't there a way to not have the texture distort?

[empleh]

"just isn't there a way to not have the texture distort? "

I am not sure. Perhaps you scale them to a standard size in photoshop, but don't constrain the proportion when you do it. That way, you will have them saved distorted but when you apply them to an odd shape they will appear normal.

I don't think there is a push button method to make them perfect without any forthought, although it might be a nice plugin to scale projections.

As far as using odd size images. It takes the same memory to hold a 513x513 image as it does a 1024x1024 because of the format that maya uses to store the information. Or at least I think it does. So don't worry about scaling an image that is 500x800 to 512x1024. It is good practice to keep your image dimensions powers of 2 (ie. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, ...)

ww

[joojaa]

Well you could have a script that asumes the pixels themselves are perfectly square and scale according to that... But if they are some other pixel aspect you get into trouble sice the computer cant know that, realy! Unless you supply the info in some way, wich offcourse is a manual task.

[jeffd]

Depending on how comfortable you are with scripting, this could be done with a little help from an external tool like ImageMagick.

• Get the texture path from the file node
• Use a system command to query the image size
• Use this value to scale your projector or UVs

--JeffD