Maya 2011 - Flipped UVs

[timberwo7ves]

Hi guys, having an issue I've had lots of times before with regards to UVs and normals not conforming to my expectations

I've got a coloured checker with numbers and letters to test - in the UVTexture Editor, if I shade the UVs, they're blue (i.e. the right way around). If I select the mesh and go "Display > Polygons > Face Normals" they're pointing outwards, as I would expect.

But the letters / numbers are reversed.

--
1 ) A lot of the modelling was done with mirroring; could this be contributing to the problem?
2 ) Is it possible to get the texture showing the correct way (i.e. letters and numbers not backwards && shaded blue in UV Texture editor && face normals sticking outwards)?
3 ) My old tutor told me (for another model) to ensure that they do follow point 2 as listed above; while I was happy to just flip the UVs, he said it could cause issues later. I don't remember the issues; does anyone know what they could have been?

In this particular case it doesn't matter so much, but would be great to know for future.

Thanks!


-- edit added pictures and further description.
If I select this tire (as in the picture) and the one on the opposite side (which was the original), and go "Mesh > Transfer Attributes", select "Sample space > Component" and "Transfer", it will:
show in the viewport with backwards texture (letters/num)
show in the UVTwindow as red (incorrect)
show with face normals outwards
if I select the UVs in the UVTwindow and flip, then everything is perfect as I want it!

But how can I fix the duplicated tire? And why does this occur?

[timberwo7ves]

If it helps, it can be easily repro'd with a cube primitive:
- create cube
- move off centre (in my case, in the x direction)
- apply checker material (with orientation guides, like numbers/letters)
- duplicate special in the [x axis, depending on where you moved the original cube]
---- is this where I'm going wrong? Should I have duplicated the input graph and or the input connections too?

[timberwo7ves]

nvm, this looks like a bug - I opened it in 2012 (SAP) and the face normals are reversed for the offending geometries; if I reverse them, all is fine

[poopipe]

mirroring in Maya is equivalent to applying a scale factor of -1 : ergo everything gets flipped. freezing your transforms should reveal the actual state of the object, at which point you can safely(probably) remedy the situation


It's the same in max, it's just that Maya doesn't make the effort to clean up after itself in situations like this.

I deal with Maya built meshes every day and it's a rare occasion that I find one that doesn't have weird normal flipping issues of some description - I dont mind but the game engine fricking hates it ...

[timberwo7ves]

Thanks man, just tried it - after the duplication, the face normals appear outwards, but freezing transforms shows them as facing inwards, and you're right; can be safely cleaned up.


OT
Things like this are pushing me away from Maya. I don't understand how something which is used so widely in industry can be so sloppy. It's not just this; I watched a video a couple months back where some guy enumerates the shortfalls of modelling in Maya with other 3D apps - all the problems can be overcome, but they shouldn't occur in the first place.

- just found a post containing the video in, not watched the second "rebuttal" video yet. (http://simplymaya.com/forum/showthread.php?t=36117)

[poopipe]

it's all down to what you know really - Maya is unforgiving but when used with care it's fine on a mechanical level

From a tech artist's standpoint Maya is a lot more accessible and open than max but then again we have to know what happens underneath or we can't do our jobs properly.

However, from a modelling/texturing perspective its a huge heap of massively outdated **** and I'd urge anybody and everybody to move onto something that's had some attention paid to it in the last 5 years.

I'm honestly being (largely) objective despite the tone. I'm no Maya novice ( not any more) - we have a mixed pipeline at work, im a tech artist and I use Maya pretty much daily to perform tasks that the application should have taken care of itself (like unifying normals or resetting transforms on mirrored objects and so on)

[timberwo7ves]

I've noted your disinclination towards Maya's modelling toolset elsewhere on the site :P But I do get it's objective; my old tutor loves it (ex-max) partly because it's unforgiving, and this is also kind of why I'm glad I'm learning this first, rather than coming from a different package.