Ok, this was really hard to get the old head around, but this technique is mostly used in Games, but useful for what I’m doing at the moment.
Say you need to combine 2 different diffuse maps for a character that has a large UV island for a hi-res Texture and the other for low-res.
A good example would be a full character UV where the heads UV would need to have more space to use a 2K map, and the rest of the body just needed a 1K map.
In my case I needed a 4K texture map for one single tentacle and a 2K map for the rest of the serpent. ( see example below )


To achieve this requires that you move one portion of the UV to -1,0 and the one would remain on 0,1. to move the texture you need to;
- Create a layered texture node
- add the 2 textures
- make sure the first texture is using ‘over’
- make sure the textures “Default color” is black.
- in the place2dtexture node, change the translate frame to -1 , 0
- turn off any wrapping, stacking
- to see the updated result you have to change the view > image range in the UV editor menu to -1 on both minimum
- select the texture you want to preview, make sure its in the right place, as Maya will not preview the texture properly
- Do a test render, if all is well you should be able to see both textures on the model
- If you are getting any weird alphas check the default color and turn of alpha is luminance