Maya UV relax

killingpeople

Hey, I was wondering what the trick was to get good results using Maya 2009's UV relax tool. The newer versions of Max have a very nice relax tool and I'd like similar results with Maya somehow. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

throttlekitty

Try giving Unwrap a try? I haven't used Relax in a long time. The trick is that you sometimes need to be a little selective when using it. Like if you did a quick UV Based on Camera, and have a set of faces that were close to perpendicular from the camera: I'd select that set and unwrap them horizontally (or vertically if applicable) once, then a full unwrap. Doing a full unwrap on very distorted UVs usually gives me a very very scaled down result that usually didn't do a good job anyway.

ivars

I've never gotten relax to do a good job (the one in the toolbar with the click and drag thingy)
I'd use unfold instead. (The other click and drag thing in the same tool)
Or sometimes I'd use unfold from the dropdown menu, which has some nice pinning and constraint options.
Also using relax from the menu seems to work much better than the tool.....

vahl

Cory, set the edge weights to world space and 10 iterations, you should get decent results with this setting...

mLink

To get results like Max's new relax, I use Maya's "Smooth UV" tool.
If you click and drag on 'unfold', it should work similar to max

AreDub3D

Relax works best when just selecting a few (or many, but not all) UVs within a mesh and you want to even out their relative positions. As others say, the Unfold slider in the Smooth UV tool is what you want, I think.