Multiple textures in cycles

Hi, I’m having an issue with my textures and for the life of me I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.

I have a model which I cut into separate section via ‘mark seam’. I then made separate uv maps for each of the section of my model, so I have separate uv maps for body, head, eyes, etc.

but when hen I try to compile the textures on to the model the textures seem to be applying themselves to other sections of the mesh. For example, I have uv map just for the models teeth, but when I add the texture to the model it applies itself to the head and eyes as well.

When am I add the texture I set its coordinates to be the uv map but I doesn’t see to do anything

i can upload some stuff to show yous what I mean if the above doesn’t make sense!

Cheers!

Always better to post those right away. Uploading the .blend file and explaining using screenshots is the easiest.

So each section has it’s own UVs, and they overlap each other? Then of course each texture gets applied to the overlapping parts, you need to separate them somehow. Several ways to do that:

-Use a separate material for each texture set. Easy, but if there are some shader functions and looks you want to share between multiple texture sets, it can be hard to keep them synced. Node groups can help with this in some cases.

-Arrange all the different UV pieces together onto one grid, and adjust textures accordingly. This is called a texture atlas.

-Offset UV sets into their own tiles and offset the corresponding textures to match. This is known as multi-tile UVs. It’s more flexible than a texture atlas, but this type of setup isn’t really supported in Blender. (you can make it work, but it’s awkward).

I think I know the problem you’re talking about - if you created the UV maps sequentially to represent individual parts of the mesh, the rest of the mesh may still be represented on your UV map, so it will try to map the texture onto the whole mesh. In the UV editor mode, either select the whole mesh or make sure the “Keep UV and Edit Mode Selection in Sync” button is off, and if you see extra geometry you don’t want, that could be your problem.

The problem is that in cycles, it will try to apply each image texture to the whole mesh, rather than to one specific part. There are a bunch of different solutions to this, but basically it boils down to this - you need to tell the material which parts of the mesh to apply the texture to, and which parts not to apply the texture to. I usually do this by scaling unwanted geometry down to a single point and putting it away in a corner, but remember that it will still try to apply the texture - whatever pixel colour that point happens to be over in your map will be applied as a flat color across the mesh. If you have a texture with an alpha channel, cutting a little transparent hole in the texture and positioning your unwanted geometry point over that can be helpful. Again, the texture is being aplied to the whole mesh, but it’s transparent over the unwanted geometry so it doesn’t interfere with the other textures.

Or you could use a mask texture to select which texture you want to use where. The principle is that you create two textures which affect the whole mesh, put them both into a MixRGB node (or even a mix shader node), and control the factor using a third, black and white texture. This can be handy if you want to shade gradually into the different textures.