UV tiling lets you use a single File texture node to load, preview, and render textures composed of multiple images that correspond to the grid tiles in your UV layout. This means you can open and display ultra-high resolution textures produced by 3D painting applications such as Mudbox, and provides a more effective alternative to using UV sets.
With UV tiling, textures are displayed as tiles in UV space. Each tile is a unit wide in width and height (1x1) in UV space. However, it is not limited to UV values of 0 to 1. Instead, the tile can span from 0 to 1, or 3 to 4, or 10 to 11 in both the U and V dimensions.
See also UV tiles.
To load and display multi-tiled UV textures
You can do this using the Attribute Editor, or using the Property Editor in the Hypershade. (See also View attributes in the Hypershade Property Editor).
Some applications, for example, Zbrush, number the UV tiles with the lower left UV co-ordinate. That is, a UV tile [0,0]x(1,1) would use u0_v0 in its file name.
Some applications, for example Mudbox, number the UV tiles with the upper right UV co-ordinate. That is, a UV tile [0,0]x(1,1) would use u1_v1 in its file name.
Maya Creative uses tokens in the file path to parse the UV co-ordinates of each texture.
After parsing the UV co-ordinates, Maya Creative indicates the number of UV tiles it has found within the specified path.
If you are currently in textured mode, or switch to textured mode at this point, Maya Creative does not automatically preview the UV tile textures in Viewport 2.0. To do so, you must manually generate the texture preview.
If you have a large texture set, you may want to select a lower quality preview to reduce the use of texture memory. You can choose to Disable Preview if you are using extremely large texture sets; or, if for any other reason, you do not want to preview the textures.
If you have more than one set of UV tiles in your scene, you can generate the preview for all UV tile sets by selecting Renderer > Viewport 2.0 > and clicking Regenerate All UV Tile Preview Textures. The global setting respects the Preview Quality setting saved for each file node.
If your textures have changed since the last time you clicked Generate Preview; for example, you have reloaded your textures, the button indicates Generate Preview* (in red) to alert you to re-generate the preview. This lets you make several changes to your texturing setup before waiting for a new texture preview.
By default, Maya Creative does not load the UV tile textures in Viewport 2.0 when a scene is first opened. You can choose to preview your UV tiles in Viewport 2.0 upon scene load by selecting Windows > Settings/Preferences > Preferences to open the Preferences window, and enabling Generate UV tile previews on scene load in the Display section. If you do not modify your UV tiles, you can always preview your textures automatically upon scene load. However, if you modify your UV tiles, you must manually regenerate your preview again by clicking Generate Preview*.
Your settings in the Bake Resolution for Unsupported Texture Types (in the Render Settings window) does not have any effect on the display resolution.
A hard clamp is applied based on your Max Texture Resolution setting (in the Viewport 2.0 Options) after you select the Preview Quality setting. However, the clamp is ignored if the tiling data is not square; that is, the ratio of rows to columns of tiles is less than 0.5 or greater than 2.
If your image file name has a custom format that does not match the available UV Tiling Mode, you can manually edit the tokens so Maya Creative can correctly recognize the UV tiling sequence.
You can load images one by one and specify the U and V co-ordinates for each one separately.
Enter the values of the lower-left UV co-ordinate that the texture corresponds to.
When you select the Use Image Sequence option, Maya Creative indicates with tokens, under Image Name, which part of the filename it interprets as the frame number, for example:
filename.u<u>_v<v>_<f>.tif
In this example, the first token represents the U value, the second token represents the V value, and the third token <f>, represents the frame number.
For each frame, Maya Creative indicates the number of UV tiles it has found within the specified path.