Headus UVLayout VS Autodesk Bonus Tools Auto Unwrap UV Tools

chacha

I've been looking at Headus UVLayout and Autodesk Bonus Tools Auto Unwrap UV Tools to figure out which is the best for getting the job done as quick as possible. So far it looks like both tools share a lot of similarities. But I wanted to read from some of you about the pro's and con's of the two. Anyone care to share why they prefer one to the other?

CharacterCarl

I prefer headus UVLayout over Maya's Bonus Tools Auto Unwrap, although I always recommend the latter one to Maya users.

This is mainly for workflow reasons: In headus you can perform cut and weld operations, among others, simply by hovering over the edges and pressing keys. Even with shortcuts inside Maya you still have to make your selection before you can, for example, split edges.

Furthermore, Maya doesn't have a reasonable way to snap UVs to an axis aligned grid (useful for anything not organic). Nightshade UV for Maya does, but these features don't work with 2016 as far as I know.

I find the initial result of unwrapping to be better inside Maya/ZBrush at times though, as Headus seems to produce overlaps more often. You can use things like the relax brush those parts though, which are generally quicker than most of the UV brushes inside of Maya 2016
As for packing speed: you can adjust that in Headus and it never takes long enough for me to notice any major differences.

chacha

Thanks for sharing that DerRazputin.

Bartalon

DerRazputin wrote:

This is mainly for workflow reasons: In headus you can perform cut and weld operations, among others, simply by hovering over the edges and pressing keys. Even with shortcuts inside Maya you still have to make your selection before you can, for example, split edges.

You can write custom scripts to get around this with the ls -preSelectHilite (-psh) command.

{
    string $preSelect[] = `ls -fl -psh`;
    string $select[] = `ls -fl -sl`;
    
    //If more components are pre-selected than selected
    if (`size $preSelect` > `size $select`) {
        select $preSelect;
        polyMapCut;
        select -cl;
    }
    //If you have more selected than pre-selected (for edge loops and such)
    else if (`size $select` > 0) { 
        select $select;
        polyMapCut; 
        select -cl;
    }
    //If nothing is selected or pre-selected
    else { warning "No components selected."; }
}

The above script lets you cut seams using a selection or a pre-selection, whichever one has more components selected. Bind it to a hotkey or just use it as a shelf button which works in conjunction with the repeat command hotkey (g).