Ick…that comment I made about manual unwrapping really does seem patronizing in retrospect, especially since it’s covered in the tutorials and documentation. My apologies.
Come to think of it, I’m not really all that patient either when it comes to UV-mapping models with obscene facecounts. Especially when, like you said, all I can see is a densely packed mass of green cubes.
-Mel
Oh, that would be a delicious feature. That’s my favorite part of Ultimate Unwrap3D…the Face Mapping]Split By Material command.
It’s a godsend when dealing with subdivided surfaces, because you can just color the low-poly control geometry and when you smooth it, all the face colors are preserved in the final geometry.
But you can do this manually in 3DC very easily. All you have to do is go into Face Coordinate mode, ctrl-alt-click on a colored face, and all faces of that color will be selected. If you set the Planar Mapping options to Tile By Unit with a value of 0.25, when you click the Unwrap button it’ll show a perfect planarmap of all the faces with the material you ctrl-alt-clicked on. Just repeat this for all the surfaces you were wanting to do.
In my opinion doing it manually yields better results because you can control where the mapping goes, rather than having sections of geometry randomly packed into UV-space.
On that note, the UV enhancements I think are essential would be:
1. Allow user to specify number of units to move/rotate UVs by for both the small and large movement/rotation increments.
2. Flip Vertical/Flip Horizontal would be nice. As it is, it’s too easy to get strange results like UVs flipped the wrong way due to the way you unwrapped an object.
Both of the above options could be added as buttons and input textboxes on the UV mapping form.
3. I’d really love to see the UV mapping abilities enhanced to handle higher-polygon meshes without stability issues. IMHO this is critical in order to make 3DC an even more attractive contender to people interested in exploiting its advanced capabilities, especially subdivision surfaces.
-Mel
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