UV Unwrapping Multiple Identical Polygons

Mousynca

Ok so I need a bit of help with unwrapping this mesh that I've been working on.
It's a set of wings which has a lot of feather polygons. What I need is all of these polygons to be stacked on a single place in the UV map. This is what I mean by that .
This is because I need the maps applied to every single polygon. Is there any way of doing this fast in 3ds of Blender?

Thanks.

AtticusMars

I don't know that this is the best way to do it but I have unwrapped hair strips like this in Blender by using quad unwrap, average island scale then using snapping to overlap them. I can do 50+ hair strips in about 10 minutes.

It's tedious work, ripe for automation, but not overly time consuming with hotkeys.

musashidan

In Max you can use the Edit> copy/paste if the topo is the same. This will stack the islands and share UV space.

AtticusMars

Copy+Paste might actually work in Blender too for that: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?348421-Addon-Copy-and-Paste-UV-Coordinates

Also, this may not work in your case but might come in handy for similar tasks: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?340206-Add-On-UV-Align-Distribute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V2b1G9TpLU

Steppenwolf

I know this isn't gonna help you right now but next time you work on something like that you can just turn the whole process on its head. Make the texture first (or a placeholder), model one feather, unwrap it on top of your texture, then duplicate and arrange as many copies as you need.

AtticusMars

I agree that would be ideal but it isn't always an option for things like this. For example if you use a tripart mesh to create hair planes in zbrush, you'll have to UV them after the fact.

musashidan

Steppenwolf said:

I know this isn't gonna help you right now but next time you work on something like that you can just turn the whole process on its head. Make the texture first (or a placeholder), model one feather, unwrap it on top of your texture, then duplicate and arrange as many copies as you need.

Good point, but I think we all get a bit excited sometimes, when arse-deep in a modeling session and completely forget this bit....

Mousynca

Thanks guys! Copy+Paste in 3ds really did the thing for me.. Thanks again!