What is your prefeered UV unwrapping application?

jonas_molgaard

Hi there,

I've been doing some 3d rocks lately and find myself unwrapping inside 3dsmax 2017 most of the time. I've heard people use Headus UVLayout, but haven't personally tried it out. Since i do rocks in ZBrush, i've also experimented with unwrapping there, but find it a bit difficult to do consistently, especially if i want to super optimize UV space. So asking out here to all you talented more gifted, and certainly more experienced than me... what app do you prefer to do uv unwrapping in? and why?

Btw. if there's already a thread about it somewhere, please link to it... i wasn't able to find it.

Millenia

I tend to use a combination of 3ds Max with Textools to generate the actual UVs, then auto-pack and tidy up in Headus UVLayout or just auto-pack in IPackThat.

gnoop

I prefer Blender with a few uv addons .  Imo  it's still the most simple and streamlined UV unwrapping  tool although Autodesk copied all its advanced approaches finally.    

Synaesthesia

I work with Max and Polyunwrapper 4 from www.polytools3d.com. Not needing to leave my modeling package and being able to keep instances intact significantly improves UV times.

jonas_molgaard

Polyunwrapper looks pretty sweet. Like that scale button they show in the demo video, which made all checkerpatters the same resolution.

JedTheKrampus

Blender for seam placement, LSCM and distortion checking, and Modo for stacking, orienting in case of anisotropy or woven cloth, packing, texel density checks, and lightmap UVs. It's just a better packing algorithm and it's really straightforward and easy to hand pack a few big islands and let the algorithm take care of the rest. IPackThat gets good results but it's kind of slow.

RaptorCWS

Headus UVLayout..... there is no going back.

jonas_molgaard

About Headus UVLayout, i just watched a few videos and while the program looks quite easy to use, i was wondering if there's still development happening on it, because the UI looked kinda old.

jonas_molgaard

I am still a noob with uv unwrapping and i just saw a ton of new words. About seam placement im still confused how to put them. I hear some saying i should put seam in cracks (for rocks) while others say i should put them on flat areas.. Im very confused what to do. LSCM and distortion.. Is that what i do when i try to not have blue and red colors when showing angle and area distortion? Finally, what is anisotropy? 

Regarding packing and optimal use of uv space.. If i make enough islands to allow filling most area, does that also help getting best texture resolution?

musashidan

My unwrap workflow for the last few years has been a combo of 3dsmax/Headus/Zbrush(seamless switching with bridging tools so it's like having all 3 sets of tools available in 1 package, essentially. Using all/none/or some tools from whichever toolset makes for ultimate flexibility.

But Max's unwrap tools have gotten a lot better in recent releases so I use less of Headus.(I still always use Headus to check distortion Zbrush can be very useful for certain assets, and its relax algoritmn is one of the best. Zbrush UVMaster is very useful for certain assets - your rock examples being one.

With Max I also use the Polyunwrapper tools and Miauu's EasyPeel script. both have been indispensible. Although Max2017 has finally given us better much better selection options, Easypeel allows editable poly selections - which if you know how the selections behaved in unwrap mod pre-2017 then you will know how powerful that is.

Max 2017 got a big update to its unwrap tools but is still a bit too buggy for me to leave 2016.

"Like that scale button they show in the demo video, which made all checkerpatters the same resolution."  You mean like the rescale Elements button that's in the unwrap mod by default?

And yes, Headus UI does look like a Commodore 64 Football Management game but it is indeed actively updated, V2.9 was released a while back. If you ask a lot of industry pros what unwrap tools they use chances are Headus will get a mention.

Red and blue are visual indicators of tension/stretching in the UVs, which is what causes distortion. Don't worry too much or overwhelm yourself about the terminology too much. Just keep studying and it'll be like your native tongue soon enough.

Anisotropy is an effect caused by light reflecting off a surface that at a microscopic level, caused by bumps, causes the reflection to repeat on every bump and the result is a long or stretched pattern of those reflections. Classic examples are brushed metal or hair.

jonas_molgaard

"Like that scale button they show in the demo video, which made all checkerpatters the same resolution."  You mean like the rescale Elements button that's in the unwrap mod by default?

This one i mean.. looks super handy, while i don't know excactly what it does or why it is important, i have a feeling it's very usefull.

musashidan

Yes, I know the one you mean. I was just joking, meaning that Max unwrap mod has a rescale elements button that normalises the texel density. This can also be set up in the packing options so that it happens when you run a custom pack.

These buttons scale all uv shells proportionally so that they will all receive equal pixel information from textures.

jonas_molgaard

About unwrapping rocks, i've tried using zbrush, and while i can split up things in seperate polygroups to create islands, i haven't found a good way to make my selections as controlled as i can in 3dsmax. If i don't use any polygroups, i'll just get one big island which often wastes a ton of uv space and thus leads to very blurry textures (as far as i understand?). Even with a texture resolution of 4096x4096 i tend to get some really bad looking textures up close and only way i've been able to compensate for that, is to scale the texture several times in ue4, but that kinda defeats the purpose of carefully making a texture that fits to my rock. Not sure im making sense? Lets say for example if i want some moss on a particular place of my rock, and the rest more or less some grey toned rocky texture, and it all turns out too blurry, if i scale this / tiles it, the moss moves around to a different location. So in ue4 i've done some detailtexturing to compensate for that, but still i want to find a way to get as crisp and clear a texture as possible so i don't always have to add detailtexturing.

musashidan

Just cut your seams in Max and use the 'existing seams' feature in ZB. Cut as many seams as you need to relieve all the distortion and aid in packing. If you're texturing in 3d the seams don't matter as much. They do raise your vert count, however, but this isn't as big an issue as it once might have been.

pasha_sevez

Headus UVLayout

jonas_molgaard

So u mean i can cut the seams in 3dsmax and then use zbrush to pack and relax uv layout? Is that the purpose of this flow?

musashidan

jonas_molgaard said:

So u mean i can cut the seams in 3dsmax and then use zbrush to pack and relax uv layout? Is that the purpose of this flow?

Yes, just make sure to unwrap the shells first in Max as the seams alone will not be recognised in ZB (just select all faces, quick peel, collapse the stack, export)

onionhead_o

Current setup > Maya, CheckerSizeTool, NightshadeUV.
back in the day when I was still using Max, i would use textools.
Imo Headus UV layout has horrendous looking UI, but quite powerful.

jonas_molgaard

About seam placement im still confused how to put them. I hear some saying i should put seam in cracks (for rocks) while others say i should put them on flat areas.. Im very confused what to do. As i understand, if i have seams in open obvious places, i need to paint over the texture with something like mudbox?

musashidan

Hiding seams is a hangup from when texturing was entirely done in 2d. And I'm talking about unique texturing here as opposed to just applying a tiling texture as the seams will obviously show up. It still has its place and it is certainly useful to hide seams in places that make sense, i.e. where they might naturally occur in real life on clothing or multi-part objects. Plus if you hide them you don't have to worry as much about painting out a lot of seams. So it is definitely still useful. 

If texturing in 3d it doesn't really matter too much if you don't hide them as you can paint them out or use triplanar texturing depending on what you're doing. I worry more about efficient packing and reducing distortion moreso than seam placement. For your rock example you can place them in areas that will result in bigger planar chunks of faces as these will relax better and will require fewer sub-seams to reduce distortion.

JGallagher

jonas_molgaard said:

"Like that scale button they show in the demo video, which made all checkerpatters the same resolution."  You mean like the rescale Elements button that's in the unwrap mod by default?

This one i mean.. looks super handy, while i don't know excactly what it does or why it is important, i have a feeling it's very usefull.

There is a modifier in 3ds max called MapScaler that does this as well. 

jonas_molgaard

There is a modifier in 3ds max called MapScaler that does this as well. 

i'll have to try that out.

Yes, just make sure to unwrap the shells first in Max as the seams alone will not be recognised in ZB (just select all faces, quick peel, collapse the stack, export)

So i did some experimenting with this workflow, and actually what i found out, was that the packing from ZB didn't look so optimal. Also i checked area distortion in max2017 and had close to same results with a map quickpeeled in Max2017 and ZB, so basically i would just stay away from the relax tool in max, since it seem to be doing more damage than good. I also noticed that the packing in max seemed to do a pretty good job, especially if i kept rotating and switching things around a bit, it seemd to figure out a new way to pack things, and eventually give me something that was pretty good. I'll see if i can post a video showing what i mean.

.Wiki

Headus UV Layout... ugly 90s gui but it´s great

musashidan

I think pre-2017 the relax tool defaults to relax by edge angles. Usually 90%of the time you'll want to relax by face angles.

izzir

I use Unfold 3D