Blender, planar unwrap

Synthesizer

I'm trying to figure out how to set the size/position/rotation of the planar unwrap in Blender. You can planar unwrap from the current view, but is it possible to set that view exactly? What I'm trying to do is a top-down projection that needs to be centered on an exact position and has an exact height/width. It seems like all the tutorials out there focus on auto-unwrapping characters.

Frankie

you can project from view(bounds) which puts the extremes of the 3d object to edge of the uv space, so you could create a quad in your mesh only used for an unwrapping guide.

burgone

if you can try and make it in 3ds max or mudbox because blender is prob the worse software for 3d

Frankie

actually good point by burgone, make it all in mudbox

Synthesizer

you can project from view(bounds) which puts the extremes of the 3d object to edge of the uv space, so you could create a quad in your mesh only used for an unwrapping guide.

That's one workaround I thought of, but somewhat tedious. Maybe a good time to start learning python scripting. For anything architectural I couldn't imagine not having exact control over uv mapping.

Frankie

I don't know if this is useful, but might be if you look into python, there's something called texture space you can get to in the bar on the right you go "object > display > texture space" or activate and manuplate with shift-T. I've no idea what it does but could be a good way to keep track of the bounds of objects you want to use. Sorry I'm not more help.

Synthesizer

Hmm. I was thinking that the view that's used to project must be passed to the unwrap function somehow, so it seems logical that it should be possible to pass a custom projection to the unwrap function.

Michael Knubben

I don't have anything helpful to post, so here's a picture of Burgone's work:

electricsauce

I don't know if this will work, but maybe set the camera to the position you want, 0 to view from camera, and then planar unwrap will do it.

frmdbl

@Synthesizer

Check out the UVProject modifier, you can set a plane as projector and give it any position or scale you want.

Synthesizer

electricsauce wrote: »

I don't know if this will work, but maybe set the camera to the position you want, 0 to view from camera, and then planar unwrap will do it.

That worked, I just needed to set the camera to orthographic with a 1:1 render resolution ratio.

UVProject also works, but it seems you can only apply to the whole object at once, rather than selected faces. It does have the nice ability to edit your mesh while preserving the projection, that could come in handy.

Thanks for the answers, I think I've got enough to work with for now.