Maya normalize uv's not normalizing like Max does?

ChrisFraser

Hey, I have a strange issue I can't seem to figure out on my own. 

I recently started using Maya and am trying to unwrap an object of mine. I've been using Max for a while and when I am packing and normalizign the UV's in Max, it actually normalizes their sizes to be in relation to each other... With Maya, it does some sort of resizing, but they are not exact matches, so (and I may be saying this wrong) the texel density is off.

Am I not understanding this or going about this wrong? Here is what it looks like if I normalize the UV's. I realize there are way more islands than there needs to be for this mesh. I'm just trying to wrap my head around the normalize tool not doing what I thought it would.

oglu

in the layout tool have you turned on prescale.?

ChrisFraser

oglu said:

in the layout tool have you turned on prescale.?

Awesome, thanks!

I had to turn Layout into legacy mode from Unfold3D and then turn on world space prescale and it worked. Thanks again!

oglu

The Unfold3D mode does also have a prescale. No need to use the legacy.

ChrisFraser

oglu said:

The Unfold3D mode does also have a prescale. No need to use the legacy.

Ya, it was weird, I tried all the different prescale options in Unfold3D but they all ended up with similar results from my screenshot...

oglu

Is the history deleted and are the transforms frozen? 

ChrisFraser

oglu said:

Is the history deleted and are the transforms frozen? 

Even after deleting the history and freezing the transforms it is still behaving the same when I use Unforld3D. Here is a screen shot of the layout settings. I've pretty much fiddled with everything in there without success. Do you see anything I have set that might be causing it not to work correctly?

throttlekitty

I've never had much luck using Layout to set correct scaling when the pieces aren't matching. We do have a get/set texel density under the UV Toolkit's Transform header. I usually use this before doing layout, picking a 'good' face to set the others.

ChrisFraser

throttlekitty said:

I've never had much luck using Layout to set correct scaling when the pieces aren't matching. We do have a get/set texel density under the UV Toolkit's Transform header. I usually use this before doing layout, picking a 'good' face to set the others.

Thanks, that seems to work. The process so far has been fairly confusing. Its not quite as straight forward as Max. I may need to find some general unwrapping tuts for Maya.

ChrisFraser

Question: Am I doing myself a disservice by using the  auto UV unwrap tool in Maya? I tried it on a few pieces of this model and it worked perfectly in less than 1 second... 

By a disservice I guess I mean, I wouldn't be learning the "right" way of doing it. Do a lot of people use auto unwrap?

onionhead_o

depends how much time you have for your task, if its a minor prop. For VFX/film artist we use it all the time. The deadlines are getting so cutthroat now that we need to save time where ever we can. it is beneficial to learn how to do clean and organized uvs.

poopipe

Most uv scaling issues in maya are due to dirt in the  object history - max doesn't have this issue because it cleans up after itself.

As far auto unwrap goes...

It's not going to give you a human readable layout,  it won't account for texture reuse and it wont account for LODs. 

I often use auto layout as a starting point - mainly to get the whole thing flattened out into clean chunks that I can stitch back together and layout properly.