3DS Max Unfold Map is making lots of seams on a simple UV

Welham14

Ok, so as you can see in the screenshot, I am trying to Unfold the UV for the back of my robot's head. It's 16 polys, forming basically a plain old rectangle.

So why oh why, when I use the Unfold tool, which I do to get an accurate shape ratio, does it add all those little cuts. I used to use this tool perfectly fine before this, now its just adding its own seams and separating things and making a mess.

Thanks guys!

furys-death

I'm confused as to why you would use unfold UV to begin with? For a simple shape such as this just planar map is and relax it to get the shape ratio you mention, and you will be good with that I expect.

Mark Dygert

If you unweld one vert you unweld them all, so you get a lot of little additional seams with a lot of automatic operations. Most people weld with a really low threshold to get around that kind of an issue. Or they work in a way that doesn't use those methods. I agree, unfold in this case seems unnecessary. You could probably get more milage out of "quick peel".

Welham14

Quick peel is great, but I doesn't try to scale the UV to its natural size. I could planar map and then relax, but unfold does the same thing with the click of a single button. So in the end all my UVs will be perfect aspect ratio to one another.

My issue is essentially why the unfold tool is acting weird. It should just stretch the rectangle without cutting seams all over it. Anyone have any experience with this particular issue?

Must be some simple fix because it used to work fine. I haven't updated my software or anything, running 3ds 2013.

Welham14

If I used a Symmetry modifier while modeling, might I have ended up with hidden vertices that overlap but aren't connected? I'm at work currently so I can't actually check but maybe that's my issue :O

agmeadows

I have ran into this issue a few times. It is usually due to an unwelded vert, open edge or some other geometry issue. If I am having problems with an unwrap I usually turn on xView in the viewport and that should give a good idea of what is going on.

Welham14

Ok thanks, I intend to sort this out by tonight, I'll report back with my results.

Welham14

No luck. My verts are all welded, nothing seems wrong. what drives the engine to separate my edges like that?

Quack!

Unfold tool isn't working as intended because Autodesk has Max on lifesupport rather than developement. So old broken features like this get shoved aside.

Just manually unwrap the pieces using Quick planar, apply a relax and don't worry about how they are scaled relative to each other. After all the parts are unwrapped just click the "rescale elements" button in the uvunwrap window and it will normalize all islands to each other. Then pack.

Welham14

Good to know, looks like I'll be modifying my pipeline a little bit lol. Thanks everyone.