Common UV transfer problems in Maya

Maya 4.5/5.0
Windows 2000
Revised October 2003
Author: Dru Abrams

I've run into this problem so many times with student's that I figured it was about time I posted something on it. I'd like to thank Estefan Vinces for providing the broken sample model as well as Steven T.L. Roselle for coming up with the fix.

Maya's transfer UV operation works best (and sometimes exclusively) on objects with identical vertex counts and Vertices ordering. There are two ways to tell if the operation was successful and both must occur.

1) Perform a transfer.
a. Select the first object and check its UV's in the UV Texture Editor (window)
b. Select the second object and compare its UV's in the UV Texture Editor.
c. When both objects are selected they're respective UV's should exactly overlap in the Editor.

2) Check your model with a texture applied in a viewport.
a. Both the original and duplicate should look identical.
b. If you're results are similar to the following image follow step 3.

3) Flip your normals to correct the problem
a. you may want to kill all history, then flip normals, then re-transfer UV's.

Conclusion: This common problem occurs mostly on model's which have been mirrored using a -X transform and then had their translations frozen. If you follow some of the following workflow options you should be able to avoid this problem

Option 1: Select original object and duplicate. Immediately transfer UV's to duplicate. Now scale -x. Now freeze Transforms.

Option 2: You already have duplicated your object, scaled it -x and then frozen transforms. Try deleting history on the duplicate, then translate -x again. Freeze translates. Now Transfer UV's, sclae -x again and then freeze transforms to get it all back together.

Option 3: Don't delete history. Scale your object -x. Freeze Transforms. Transfer UV again. Scale -x again. Freeze transforms again. (this may work...)