Hey everybody, I believe in if you figure something out, then share it, none of that "NVM, figured it out" blasphemy.

So, I'm gonna show everybody how to easily make FPS Camera Controls for Maya, How to Assign Different Materials to Static Meshes in Maya, and How to Cut Faces in Maya




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FPS MAYA CAMERA CONTROLS
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Me and my team are doing stuff with the UV Maps of our static mesh building models in Maya to assign material attributes to them.

However, trying to navigate inside the building mesh is a freakin nightmare until I figured this out.


1. If it's a building your needing to go into, maneuver your camera to a hole (door) your wanting to go into for starters. The new camera movement works great navigating inside a mesh, but is kinda weird/hard outside.


2. Up top towards the left, right next to the red movement arrow is a camera with a little script on it. Click it




3. In the "Attribute Editor" that should have popped up on the right of your screen, scroll down until you find Movement Options. From there, change all three values for "Tumble Pivot" to 0 and make sure "Use Pivot As Local Space" is checked




4. Now when you hold down "alt-left click", instead of rotating the entire model, just your camera view will move, as in a FPS


*5. If you want your camera to behave like it did before, just uncheck "Use Pivot As Local Space". *

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ASSIGN MATERIALS TO STATIC MESHES
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Now I mentioned above about my team assigning materials to our static mesh for use in the UDK, so for those of you that are curious on how to do that, here you go.



1. First off, if your model looks wireframe, just press the "5" key on your keyboard to make shaded (way way easier to see your faces). Once you have done that, "hold right-click" on your model and select "Face".





2. Hold "Shift" and "Left Click" to select the faces you need. *if you accidentally undo your selection, good ol "Ctrl-Z" or "Undo" will reselect your faces*





3. With your faces selected, on your model, hold "Right-Click" and go down to "Assign Favorite Material" then select "Lambert". Not sure if you have to select "Lambert" but it works for us. Plus, if you want more material types options then select "Assign New Material..." instead. Play around with them if you want, but like I said, "Lambert" works for us.







4. On the right side of the screen, the "Attribute Editor" should now be up. Where it says "lambert" (where I wrote CHANGE NAME) is where you can type the new name of your new material slot. Under "Common Material Attributes", if you click the box next to "Color", you guessed it, you can change the color of your faces (useful when you have a lot of material slots for the faces, so you can keep track of them)





5. Repeat steps 2-4 to assign different material slots to different faces. However, if you discover that a different face shares the same texture as a different face you have already created a material slot for, to save time and effort, just "shift left-click" the faces you want as we did in earlier steps, hold "right-click" on your model, "Assign Existing Material" and choose the one you want.









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HOW TO CUT FACES IN MAYA
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*If you discover that one of your faces is sharing a material slot with another part of a face that needs a different material slot (i.e. you have a long wall that extends into multiple rooms. All the faces in the different rooms need different textures yet they all share the same face which will make them share the same texture) follow these steps.*



1. Select the face/faces you want. Then right above your work view, select the little red arrow with a dotted green border around it (the "Isolate Select" button), and if nothing happened then click it again. This makes it easier to see what your cutting (not super practical for the roof were using but really comes in handy for walls and such inside a mesh)








2.Select the "Polygons" tab two rows underneath the top ("File, Edit, Modify, Create, etc...". Then select the "Split Polygon Tool" (red arrow selecting for squares with a white selection)










3. Once you have done that click the first edge, then the next, then press "Enter" to complete. This will have cut your face into 2 separate faces that you can assign different materials to. If you can't select the different faces after doing this, just hold "right-click" on your model again and select "Face". *Couldn't include screenshots because of the 9 image limit for a post, should be pretty easy though to figure out*





*Also, semi-random info. One of my team mates said "if flat use planar mapping (make sure to select the axis that is perpendicular to the surface) or UV auto mapping" to fix something. Can't remember what it fixes but just throwing it out there for anybody*


Thanks for reading and hope this helped somebody