Straighten curved UVs - Cloth - 'Sewing pattern like'

gestoryscht

Hi guys,
I wonder what your workflow is to straighten curved UVs like sculpted cloth has.
I'm very new to Maya, but to be honest I wouldn't know any real solution for this in my native 3D program.



As you can see, the wip cloth is very curved and had some "subtle" wrinkles. As expected, after a quick 'n dirty unfold, the UVs are not that straight. sometimes this could be good enough, but I want to apply a texture to it with a geometric pattern. 

https://cdna2.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/826/090/large/marie-vorlander-selah-sm.jpg?1477698702

How could I achieve this UV structure in Maya? The topology of the corners are perfectly 90° and it should be possible to generate a flat and straight sewing pattern for this.

Thanks for your help!

musashidan

There's no trick, really. It's just a matter of relaxing the unwrapped shell(s). There are tools like rectilinear unwrap in Headus UV Layout and a similar method in Max. But I don't know the equivalent in Maya. As always with unwrapping curved geo to squared up UVs, it's always a trade-off of distortion Vs a straightened shell. Some manual UV editing(perish the thought for a lot of beginners) can help a lot -  Viewing the preview in viewport whilst tweaking verts.

Also, natural seams in the geo - i.e, as cloth would be sewed in the real-world is a must. And helps with alignment of back/front shells.

I'm afraid 'quick and dirty' is a euphemism for lazy.

gestoryscht

Too bad, I thought there is some script or build in tool in Maya for this kind of problem.
In Blender, we have an AddOn called UV Squares and this would be a good starting point for this task.

https://youtu.be/VYZnGIql2UI?t=1m18s

Is there a way of pinning UVs? Straighten a row of vertices, pinning and afterward relaxing the shells?

The quick 'n' dirty was a euphemism for 'let's do a fast unwrap to show the guys the problem'