Align UV Island from Edge/UV Point Selection

Jack M.

I've been looking for a solution to align an entire UV island to the nearest 90 degree rotation from either an edge selection or two uv's selected. Manually rotating uv islands just to get rectangles squared up in the uv editor is a huge waste of time and being able to do that with a button press would be a godsend.

I'm not very skilled with Python yet, so any help providing script examples or even showing a way to do it with the default Maya tools would be incredibly helpful.

SebastianBielecki

I'm guessing you want to select edge of a UV island and align whole island horizontal or vertical using that edge? TexTools have those possibilities (i know they are for Blender and Max, Dunno about maya). That is a free plugin.

Axi5

What version of Maya?
2017 has some new UV tools, you can auto orient or orient to edge etc.

Take a look at the new UV editor

Jack M.

@SebastianBielecki Yeah, that's what I want to do. I used to do it in max using textools all of the time, but obviously that's not in Maya.

@Axi5 I'm using 2016 unfortunately. I found nightshade and that's really done the trick for me. Excellent toolset, and I can see why it was bought out by Autodesk.

After much deliberation, it seems nightshade and a bit of UV Deluxe will suit my needs properly.

TTools

@Jack M.
I rewrote the AlignUV tool from texTools for Maya some time ago.  I think this is what you are looking for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIyX98A3j-U

More info can be found here:
http://www.thomashamiltonart.com/TTools.html

Jack M.

Mint work there . I'll definitely be checking them out.

renderhjs

TexTools for Blender actually supports mutlie UV islands, just select multiple edges.

There are some other tools in there as well such as the Sort Horizontal and vertical which will automatically align UV islands by their bounds to be most compact and then sort them by size.

Other tools like the Align Tools behave identical to the 3dsMax version of TexTools

TTools

@renderhjs
Is there a port of TexTools for Maya?  I use them religiously in 3dsMax, but couldn't find a Maya version years ago when I wrote my AlignUV tool for Maya.  I looked online and there seem to be a lot of old posts around the 3d community hoping that one had been developed.  I know a lot of Max users who find themselves in Maya immediately ask for TexTools.  Is there a reason why you haven't ported them, or have I just not looked in the right place online?
cheers, and great work on your tools dude

renderhjs

@TTools
I was never a big Maya person, the times I used it in the past I was really scared by the limited modeling tools. Always liked 3dsMax and it's modifier based modeling (e.g. symmetry was really bad in maya).
As I said to someone else on Twitter, depends where I might work in the future and what 3D packages they use. At work have been often a 3dsMax house also largeley because of me.
Been learning a lot of python since I got serious with Blender last year and more than keen on applying that knowhow to other environments as well. Right now however I am really enjoing Blender + its free unlike Maya.

I would hope to see Blender or TexTools for Blender also as another option for people to do external stuff like unwrapping, baking, shading,.. stuff people already use a lot of external tools for. Because after all Blender is free and therefore available to any one on any platform.

throttlekitty

@TTools that would be Nightshade UV, which was bought and integrated into maya. It's cool to see, but the new UI is a complete trainwreck, especially compared to NSUV, which was inspired by TexTools AFAIK.