Questions on Headus UVLayout

ArtbyV

I’ve tried many different methods of generating UVs, but nothing I’ve used comes close to Headus. I’m going to purchase it, but I can’t decide between the Professional and Hobbyist editions.

On one hand I like the idea of not having to keep a dongle plugged in, but Professional edition does have Map Repainting, Advanced Packing, and Advanced SUBDs. Since I haven’t used those options before, I was wondering if it’s worth going with Pro?

They do mention on their website that you can upgrade from Hobbyist to Pro for a $100 discount, but the difference in price from Hobby to Pro is $100. Not sure how much the upgrade is. If anyone can give me some advice, I’d appreciate it! Thanks!

CreativeSheep

I bought the professional a few years ago but I haven't upgraded in those years either as nothing was inspiring for me to update.  There is a discrepancy between Maya and UV Layout with regards to stretching and bunching on your UV, I wish that line was very narrow so that when I UV in UV Layout and bring it to Maya UV tools for touch up etc the stretching and bunching would be identical.  

Another little hang up I have with UV layout is you can't for example straighten an edge loop then move the edge loop to fix stretching for example; I have load Maya UV tools which I know have gotten better from 2015+ and do it in Maya UV tools, then when you bring it into Maya UV tools you can straighten but not by an average straighten, you end up having to straighten the edge loop on the UV island, followed by moving the edge loop, not a big issue but when you are doing it multiple times it becomes frustrating; this is something I'm currently facing.

CheeseOnToast

In short, get the pro version if you can. Copy UVs and some of the advanced packing options are too useful to give up, IMO.  Local scaling prevents the program automatically resizing all the UV islands to the same texel ratio, allowing you to give more or less texture space to certain shells if needed. Segment is really handy if you're doing a lot of hard surface stuff, working a bit like an auto-unwrap but with an angle threshold specified by the user. It'll separate faces whose shared edges are higher than the degree entered, which can save quite a bit of time. It's not limited to projecting from a fixed number of angles, like Maya's automatic mapping.

ArtbyV

CheeseOnToast said:

In short, get the pro version if you can.

Thanks man. Exactly what I was looking for. I'll just pick up the pro version. For anyone curious, the upgrade from hobbyist to pro is $200 so it kinda just makes sense to go with pro outta the gate.