(Maya) How to straighten organic UVs?

afxwinter

Does anyone have any tips for how to go about straightening organic UVs so they're easier to paint on in a 2D program?  I've attached an example of hands and arms that have had the fingers straightened out.  I can't seem to reproduce this myself in Maya.  My character's hands fingers want to stretch away from eachother.

throttlekitty

I think I would start with a planar projection and cut it in half to get a top and bottom shell. Maybe cut off the fingers and either Relax or Unfold horizontally, then start easing everything into place? It might take a good deal of selective unwrapping and/or work with the nudge tool, but you can get there.

Alex_J

the way I straighten uv's in maya is grab the border vertices, move them into place either with the scale tool or use the align tools in the UV toolkit, then pin them, then select the shell and optimize. To get a quick start you can grab the UV's on the finger tips, make a big soft selection radius by surface, not volume, and use move and rotate to get them roughly into place.

All techniques shown here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_KLbTUdKms

Neox

can you merge UVs in maya that do not belong to each other as vertices? that helps a ton in max to get things straight.


and no, pinning does not do the same job. as pinning makes sure verts do not move at all. But i want them to move, just in a way that they can balance themselves out.

Alex_J

Doesn't look like it to me. That looks like a good technique so I tried a couple ways in maya but couldn't really do anything similar. But I only have enough maya experience to know my usual workflow and not a lot else, so don't write it off just because I don't know.

There is actually a tool called Merge UV's, but : 

afxwinter

Thanks so much for the replies!  This will all be super helpful as I work through this.

Neox

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

Doesn't look like it to me. That looks like a good technique so I tried a couple ways in maya but couldn't really do anything similar. But I only have enough maya experience to know my usual workflow and not a lot else, so don't write it off just because I don't know.

There is actually a tool called Merge UV's, but : 

maybe there is also a script to turn that on. Autodesk also turned it off for Max after Max 2013 i think. When I asked about it, they told me that this isn't possible anyways and who would need that? Oh well, turned out they made a toogle and didnt create UI for it...

throttlekitty

nope, polyMergeUV can't be made to merge if they don't share a vertex.

Neox

thats sad, it's basically my most used features and beats almost all the other newer methods like pinning by far.

throttlekitty

Neox said:

thats sad, it's basically my most used features and beats almost all the other newer methods like pinning by far.

It sounds pretty handy actually, got me thinking on how to hack this in, like a constraint or something.