startibartfast
Mar '14

Hello everyone. 

I'm curious what the best way to texture a keyboard is.

I am capable of doing it key by key, but as you know that would take a lot of time. I'm not that great with UV work--uwrapping or the likes...but I understand the concept.

Are there any videos or tutorials out there that would teach me how to quickly and accuretly texture a keyboard. I can't think of a way to model a single mesh into an accurate keyboard, which then you can UV map.

Should I just do every key? :slight_smile:

I don't think a bump or normal map will do it...I assume that to get an accurate keyboard I'll need to model the keys, correct?

Here is a ref image...for reference.

Thank you in advance.

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    Mar '14

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zoonbats
Mar '14

Here's the way I would approach it.

Model one key, with nice rounded edges and such. Looks like you've got that set up with the top left key. Then you can fairly quickly duplicate this all over the keyboard. Go into component mode and adjust the different shaped keys to their proper size while keeping the rounded edges intact. In other words, instead of scaling it in object mode, which would mess up the consistent size of the rounded edges of the keys, select groups of vertices in component mode and move them to their proper positions, using your keyboard image as a reference.

In Photoshop or whatever your image editing software is, you're going to take that reference image and make a new texture image out of it for all the keys. Turn everything white except the letters, numbers and symbols on the keys. Save this as your keys texture. Just make sure you keep this image the same size as the reference image, and everything will still line up perfectly when you assign the texture.

In Maya's Hypershade, create a new material and set the keys texture in the color channel.  Select all the keys. Then Assign your keys texture to them all at once. This will more than likely look garbled at first. It's assigned, but it still needs to be mapped. Go to Create UVs > Planar Mapping (Options). Make sure Project from Y Axis is selected. If you've used the image as a reference for positioning keys, it should be perfectly mapped - if not, some minor tweaking in the UV texture editor using the scale tool will get it there in short order.

Now just make a separate brushed metal shader for the body/shell of the keyboard.

(The reason for making the separate keys texture all white is that if you mapped the reference image on the keys, the tops of the keys would look correct but the sides would be dark grey, as that's how the reference image depicts the physical holes in the keyboard shell. You'd have to spend a little extra time re-mapping the sides of the keys.)

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