[Blender 2.8] UV island orientation, any tools?

bitinn

I spend a non-negligible amount of time everyday trying to keep major uv islands of my asset facing the same orientation, so that texturing is easier (patterned texture can align easier).




(not actually texturing them like this, but a quick example.)

(you might argue in my specific case, I could avoid cutting some of these seams, but I cut them for a good reason: I have different texture variant for this same mesh, so the round corner is not necessarily tiling/same material, hence the seam.)

The reason I need to do this manually is because most uv unwrap and layout tool doesn't take into account the "world-space orientation" of an uv island, thus can't really auto-orient them.

I wonder if there is a Blender function or addon that does this. Furthermore, do you care about the your uv island orientation? If so, how did you do it? If not, how did you align patterned textures?

jRocket

I would unwrap like normal, then make sure one of the faces is straightened and oriented the way you want, and use "follow active quads" to auto-uv the rest of it based on that face. If your selected face is perfectly straight, the rest of the uvs should be too.

To make the uv edges straight, I select an edge, scale, constrain to x or y axis, and press 0. There should be an easier way to do that though.