21 - Maya 2015 - Creating the UV Snapshot
A UV Snapshot will create a texture that allows you to see exactly where on the UV space your UV shells are located. This texture will look rather identical to your UV map within Maya's UV Editor. The purpose of this UV Snapshot is so that you can take the UV Snapshot over to another application such as Photoshop and use the lines to paint your texture. Think of kind of like having a tracing of your model laid out flat so you can paint inside the lines. Where ever the UV lines are on the texture is where your model's texture will be applied to the 2D image within the image editing application. Creating the UV Snapshot is really easy to do and only requires a little bit of time to set up.
The first thing we will need to do is assign the location for the UV Snapshot to be saved. We will also need to assign the type of image it will save out as. For this step it is recommended that you save out the UV Snapshot as a PNG file. When you save a UV Snapshot out as a PNG it will save out the background of the image as transparency. This is ideal for the purposes of developing the texture as you will be able to place a layer underneath the UV Snapshot for painting. While you paint your texture onto the underlying layer you will be able to see the UV lines for your model due to the transparent UV Snapshot above it.
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