UVs with a Basic Shape

I had three goals with this assignment: Learn how to do UVs, learn about smoothly-beveled edges, and figure out how the UV Texture Map chose its arrangement of rectangles.

I arranged the dots for the faces in a jpg file purposely in the wrong order (opposite faces add up to 7 in any standard pair o' dice), so I would have to learn how to map the faces to different areas of the jpg file, and purposely incorrectly arranged the dots on the face with 2 so I would learn about editing the UVs post-mapping.

I thought a pair o' dice would give me opportunity to try out all those things I set out to learn without making it too difficult to navigate through the UV-rectangle-mapping maze.

I was wrong. It was much too difficult. I gave up on how to smooth out the corners and edges, putting in a token flat bevel and shading to suggest it. I did not succeed in finding out how the UV automatically updates after post-mapping editing; note the two dots on the 2 face vertically aligned, where they should be diagonally aligned as they are in the jpg file.

Here it is, ready to hang from your virtual rear-view mirror:

The difficulty mostly sprang from Maya's rats-nest of an interface. What a nightmare! I ended up pulling my hair out and screaming at it several times. Even Windows knows better than to display a button for everything the program does all the time, even when the feature is not active. Even Microsoft Office knows better than to make the same commands do different things if everything looks like it should be doing the same thing it did a minute ago. Some features, such as the difference Boolean, are completely unreliable, working after some attempts but not others.

Maya crashed a lot. I now have some kind of handle on it: When I made a menu choice that appeared not to have done anything, then chose from the same menu again, Maya would inevitably crash; any unsaved changes became lost work. I found it particularly irritating when I would tell it to render; it would try to save the scene, and would not accept a render choice until that very helpful dialog box about the file having been worked on by the student version of Maya had been dismissed, despite any attempt to dismiss it causing a fatal beachball.

We, the users, should hold out for better interface practices than this, but I fear the majority of the world, browbeaten into using Microsoft products and enticed into using Playstation (without question the worst interface I have ever seen for a digital device of any sort) has been trained to expect no better. At the very least, the Mac versions of programs should conform to the still-revolutionary Human Interface Guidelines that Apple created for their developers, which advises (among many other things Maya should be paying attention to) that, for example, an unusable feature should be either grayed out or not taking up screen space.

The things I need to learn still from this lesson:
1. I could not figure out how to quantify the Cut Faces, Split Polygon and Edge Loop tools to give me the precision I wanted.
2. My vertices are still not snapping. This is a very useful function, but it somehow got disabled and I have no idea how to get it back, even though I've been shown how.
3. I could not get the trick of getting the object's surfaces to automatically update when the UV document is edited in Photoshop.
4. And, of course, rounding off the edges. There must be a feature that does that. In fact, I probably saw this feature when a cylinder turned into a jellydonut shape when I unknowingly typed some key on the keyboard. I figure there's a way to take control of whatever that was and use it to round off an object's edges.