Using Maya: Fixing UV errors.

  When doing the UVs on my door, I noticed my Bells had a weird section where the pattern distorted.

 I opened up the UV texture editor and took a look at the mesh.

To fix this, I need to sew as many parts of the Bell as I could so that the texture pattern could wrap around it efficiently. I had to think of the different parts of the bell, so I knew what I need to sew. The area in which the error occurs is the outside edges from the top and bottom of the bell, so I needed to sew all them together.

To do this, I selected the UV tab and highlighted parts of the edging to the bell by clicking the vertexes. This particular piece needed to be rotated.

In the UV editor tool bar I selected the rotation tool to turn this section around to match the rest of the edging mesh.

I then sewed the loose edges together.

 To make sure everything fits together nicely, I adjusted the size of the two ends of the bell using the scale tool.  I then placed them inside the rim of the bell. This makes it easier tidier.

Here you can see where I have sewn all the edges to the bell. However, some of the inside edges were not straight.

 To do this, I selected the edges which were uneven and used a special tool in the UV texture editor that straightened them out. This tool used 4 different alignments, one for the top, bottom, left and right edges to straighten out. The image below shows four red arrows and 4 sets of yellow dotted lines. These are the tools are used.

There! a better UV map with a cleaner mesh!