Please explain to me the difference between Textools and polyunwrapper

boumay

Hello,
I don't want an app war at all, but I'm a newbie at unwrapping and I really want to understand the benefit of polyunwrapper before buying it, since it's 35 dollars, so it's not cheap.
And people seem to love textools and that it brings useful features, that it and polyunwrapper seem to have in common.
What "THE" feature(s) polyunwrapper has over textools to be worth buying it?

Again, I hope I won't upset anybody, I just want to understand and get the more efficient and fatest tools for uv work.
Thank you.

pior

Considering that these two add-ons require Max, you could very well use yet another solution : using the regular Max tools (enhanced with a free addon like Textools, or the Chuggnut Unwraptools, which I personally use) along with the free standalone Roadkill, which offers a fantastic workflow speed and great results. You will still need to work a bit within Max in order to scale/rotate/arrange UV chunks tho, but that's always a necessary step anyways.

boumay

I found roadkill painful with edge selection, and, afaik, it's for organic shapes mainly, isn't it?
I also thought it was outdated now.

pior

Well, I don't know if it is outdated, but I personally sure use it for every project and for any kind of model - be it organic or mechanical. But then again, everybody has their own workflow ... I simply settled for it because it perfectly fits my needs. My favorite toolset is actually Maya/MayaLT + Roadkill, since Maya has an awesome soft selection brush for UVs that I never found a match for in any other program.

(sorry for not directly answering your original question btw !)

boumay

no problem, thank you for this, it is informative indeed.

Eric Chadwick

Polyunwrapper has an easy way to apply smoothing groups based on UV edges, and vice versa (IIRC). Textools function for this is not as good. Lot of other cool tools in Polyunwrapper. I'm a bit biased though as I got it for free (I beta tested a lot). Isn't there a demo? Usually best to have a play with these things, see what works great vs. not.

Baj Singh

Used TexTools for years and still love it especially for mirroring UVs. However, have started to implement zbrush more for as its relax feature works pretty well...

Joost

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

Polyunwrapper has an easy way to apply smoothing groups based on UV edges, and vice versa (IIRC). Textools function for this is not as good.

I personally haven't had any problems with Textools and auto-assigning smoothing groups/ splitting uvs by smoothing group. Though I haven't tried Polyunwrapper so I can't really compare.

boumay

Thank you everybody for these infos, I learn new stuff here.

BlvdNights

Headus UVUnwrap is pretty solid too

boumay

headus seems nice, but it's pretty expensive, I was rather looking at expanding max capabilities, which are pretty solid too now