UV mapping in Max

matthewjvia

I normally use Maya, but I had to switch to Max for my new job, so I'm kind of unfamiliar with it still. I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to unwrap UVs in Max only in the U or V direction rather than both. It's one of my favorite features from Maya because it makes things like architecture, tubes, etc fast and easy to UV map. When I asked my coworkers, they looked at me like I was a crazy person and didn't see the use in doing that. Does anyone know if there is a way or a plugin to do it?

Noors

Yeah i don't get it either. Example ? 1D unwrapping ? What would it be ? A line ?

low odor

I never use it...but I'm pretty sure that's what this is:

matthewjvia

low odor: Thanks, but that is changing the axis the the UV texture editor is using. I honestly have no idea what use that would have though.

Noors: I use it mostly for architecture. I could planar map a piece of modeled trim, for example, and snap the edges to the edge of the UV space, then unwrap vertically. That way the UVs space out correctly for the width of the model with no overlap and I can easily tile the texture horizontally. I can make a texture that is just a series of tiling strips and get a ton of use out of the one texture.

For example, this screenshot is from a WIP on my portfolio. I don't have the textures up, but I used the same method here and was able to get almost everything in the room on the same texture map as tiling strips. I would like to be able to do the same thing in Max, but right now I can't find a way to unfold in just one direction at a time.

Noors

Screens of your unwrap process would have been more useful
I don't doubt i'm slightly retarded but i still don't see it.
If your process isn't strictly doable in Max, there's maybe a workaround.

WarrenM

I'm not 100% sure what you're asking for either. Do you want rectangular unwraps of things? That first button under "Reshape Elements" will attempt to put your UV island into a rectangular shape but that's probably not what you're asking ... is it?

As Noors said, some examples would help.

shawnolson

I'm not 100% clear about what you are getting at here... but I think you may simply be asking about Planar mapping and/or seeing the tiling? If so... you can look into the Mapping > Flatten Mapping to create flattened UVW. To see the tiling, click the Options in UVW edit window and increase the tiling to what you want and check the Tile Bitmap option.

Also, here is a really awesome plugin for any kind of Planar Mapping work: PolygonMap by Vladislav Gavrilov. Well worth the small fee. See the screenshots and Youtube videos for explanations and demonstrations.

poopipe

I believe he's wondering if there's an equivalent to the vertical/horizontal constraints on the unfold tool

short answer - no

long answer -

things you could try:

you can use spline unwrapping to straighten out UVs for complex tupe/cabley shapes

you can select a strip of faces and unfold using the walk to next face option - it should come out fairly straight but no guarantees

you could split the mesh along the loops at each awkward corner, quick peel all the hulls together, relax to unify scale and then stitch em back together again. it actually wouldn't take long and since you can trust quick peel to do the job properly it should come out alright

however...

by far the best option is to pre-empt this problem by applying UVs at creation - if you built your trim from a spline or loft there's a create UVs tickybox that'll build you a nice neat set of straight UVs set up to tile along the length of the object. you only need to scale em after that


editing UVs in max is generally a much more pleasant experience than in Maya. I miss the align tools and the unfold constraints but every other aspect of the process is ten times less ballache in max, it just requires a bit of a shift in thinking cos the tools actually do a lot of the work for you.