All images from Learning Maya 7 | Foundation by Marc-André Guindon and Cathy McGinnis. Reprinted with permission.

This is an excerpt in a series from Learning Maya 7 | Foundation by Marc-André Guindon and Cathy McGinnis from Alias|Learning Tool. In the Texturing the Orb excerpts, you will learn to texture a polygonal meshing. Even though polygons have a default setting for UV parameters onto which textures can be applied, you will need to adjust these settings for each specific application. You can use special polygon tools to assign and modify these kinds of values on the orb.

You will first apply texture projections in order to create UV coordinates on the polymesh. Then you will texture map the orb using a series of texture maps imported as file textures.

In these Texturing the Orb excerpts, you will learn the following: How to project textures on polygons, how to manipulate projections; how to use the Texture Editor; how to use the Paint Selection Tool; how to manipulate UVs and how to animate a texture.

Spherical Mapping
The body geometry of the orb will be textured using a spherical projection. A spherical projection works just like the planar projection, except that the texture is wrapped around your model on a sphere, like a wrapper on a candy.

1. Apply a spherical projection
• Assign the metalBlinn material to the body.

• With the body mesh selected, select Polygon UVs > Spherical Mapping.

A large spherical manipulator is positioned around the selected geometry, defining the way the texture is wrapped around the object.

2. Tweak the spherical projection
By default, the texture does not cover the entire projection sphere. For the entire sphere to be covered, the texture is tiled and repeated. In this case, you want the texture to completely wrap the object.
• Click+drag the red manipulator handle all the way to the back of the sphere until the projection joins together.

Spherical projection.	Full spherical projection.

3. Cover the projection sphere
• Click+drag the green manipulator handle and move it all the way up to completely cover the projection sphere.