Hi Richard,
I’m currently working on mapping a model – I took some notes – so I figured I’d try to put this list all in one place… I’ll start off with the ones I already mentioned…
1) Full Screen Texture Mapping Windows – it’s crazy trying to work in those tiny windows that the current mapping operations provide… At a minimum – give us a full screen to work with… Texture sizes keep getting larger – I plan to move to 2048×2048 textures on my current model… It will be very difficult to work in those small windows…
2) Rotate a Texture – I believe we have flip and mirror already – which I don’t think I’ve ever used… We do need the ability to rotate as more than once I have had to duplicate a texture – just because the original was running the wrong way… Even just 90 degree increments would be very useful…
3) Mark Image File for Template – the "UnWrap" operation that actually marks the base texture with the reference to the shape that is mapped to – is very useful – but totally unreliable… I have had it work sometimes – but – most of the time it doesn’t leave the required marks on the base template… I’m not up to mapping on my current project – so I am stating this from memory… I think if your base texture was a different size than 512×512 it didn’t work – I forget… This operation should work reliably on all size textures…
4) Unwrap a Cylinder – Many of us use your software to build steam engines – and – it’s impossible to avoid cylinders with them… Unwrapping a cylinder is very difficult… The operation that I am aware of will let you texture a cylinder – but – the faces are always distorted at the top and bottom where the curvature of the cylinder causes an angled view of the face… The only way I have found to do this well – without significant distortion – is to map each face one at a time to an area on a texture… This way each face lies flat but it’s very tedious attempting to line up all the faces by hand… This seems like a pretty straight forward task – and – I would think it would be possible to create a tool to perform this task automatically… This would be a HUGE time saver… ATTACHED IMAGE BELOW…
5) Texture Crop – Zoom on texture cropping window – mapping textures to shapes is a pretty precise operation – sometimes being off by just a pixels width matters – we need to be able to zoom in to better view what we are cropping…
6) Texture Crop – the ability to name and save crop areas… It’s pretty easy to lose you crop points and have to do them all over again… There are many times I want to crop the same region for a different part – unless I diligently record all the numbers – it’s like starting all over again trying to map to the same region… If we had the ability to save and name these regions it would greatly improve this process… Take a page from Paint Shop Pro – almost every operation you perform has the ability to be named and saved so you can repeat it later…
7) Texture Crop – Point Positions – the current data point windows only show out to two decimal places – I’m routinely out to the fourth place decimal on 1024×1024 textures – I would assume I would go even further with larger textures… We need to increase the windows size to allow more numbers to be visible… In conjunction with that – the increment/decrement controls only work in tenths which is not very useful… We need a much finer granularity control to more accurately position our points…
Proportional Mapping – right now when we “UnWrap” or “UV Map” a shape if you don’t crop an area beforehand – it fills the entire texture losing all proportions to the original shape… Even if you do crop an area the original shape proportions are lost and it assumes the proportions of the cropped area… We should have an option to “LOCK” the original proportions and scale/position the shape on the texture accordingly…
9) During “UV Map” or “UV Remap” operations we need some better tools to control the points… We should have alignment and distribution tools to stack points on either the X or Y axis… First point selected should be the reference to align all other points to…
10) An overall better measurement system for mapping textures – instead of basing all the measurements on a percentage of the orginal texture – it really should be based on pixels… That would allow for the most precision when mapping to a texture…
[b:xe0fy0bq]EXAMPLE: Extruded Cylinder Mapping[/b:xe0fy0bq]
The problem with any of the "canned" cylinder wrap operations we have now is – the wrap is so distorted – there is no way to have a complex texture with hand drawn details on it… The PIX below illustrates the only way I could get it to work… I had to individually map each face – get it in position – then play with it – to minimize distortion – so I could have nice straight rivet lines on the boiler… It took forever to adjust the green dots to make it work and I repeat this process on every model I make… This one had a total of – 56 faces or 224 points – individually mapped and positioned… This is a major hassle… There has to be a way to possibly automate this process or at least provide some alignment tools to speed the process…
[img:xe0fy0bq]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v304/scottb613/TS%20WIP/ScreenShot005-1.jpg[/img:xe0fy0bq]
Regards,
Scott
