Automatic UV Unwrap in Painter - Feedback Wanted!

Jerc

Hi everyone, you may have seen the news that a new update to Substance Painter is available and that it features our new automatic UV unwrap algorithm. It's still in beta but is already giving some great results.

We'd be thankful if when you try the feature and find that the UV it's giving you has errors or quality issues, if you could share these problematic meshes with us to help refine the algorithm and reach our ultimate goal of the perfect automatic UV

Thank you!

You can find more information about the release here!

oglu

It does look interesting! 
Does it support UDIMs? 

Jerc

Not yet, but as soon as we support UDIM fully in the public build, you can expect the UV feature to support it as well.

oglu

Thanks for the info Jerc.

Are there any known issues if you have an asset with a lot of polyshells.
I have here two belts on a character and those arnt unfolding correct if i export everything combined.
If i export only the belt i get a clean unwrap.

Jerc

One issue can be that vertices that are at the same position will be merged by the UV process, so that may impact the UVs negatively. Other than that, since each piece of geometry is unwrapped separately before being packed, having more pieces shouldn't impact the quality of the unwrap.

oglu

I will do a second test and report back. 

Cyaneyed

We thought the example of the robot being automatically unwrapped was fairly misleading. This was due to the automatic unwrapper only being able to give one UV shell per mesh. It seems that this tool works for some organic examples ( such as those given by yourself) , but isn't ideal for hard surface unless the mesh is split into separate submeshes per desired UV shell.  

we tried a few hard surface meshes, none with desirable results. Even something as simple as a cube doesn't unwrap without severe stretching. 


Is multiple UV shells per mesh a feature that you are working on / plan to implement in the future? 

is there something we are doing wrong?

EGGO

Just experimenting with it a bit and there's some strange results on simple geometry....

oglu

Did a second try and its working now as exprcted. 

I have to agree with the posts above. Sometimes its not good to have only one UV shell per polyisland. 

Finnn

Incredible work. I would love to read more about the algorithmic approach! 
Automatic UV mapping is the future, please relief us from this tedious work. 

Jerc

A cube is the worst case scenario for this method because all faces, vertices and edge are virtually the same, and you'll see other automatic UVs algorithms fail in similar ways 
You are right, the main current limitation is that it creates a single UV chart per piece of geometry. It works best on organic models and complex models with lots of sub-objects at the moment. low poly hard surface is probably its weakest point for now, but it's also the easiest to manually unwrap .
As we said it's a first beta and there is tons of room for improvements, thank you for the feedback! If you have models that fail spectacularly, please send them over if you can to help us refine the feature!

oglu

Would the automatic UV feature recognize hard edges and split the mesh there? I know its not needed to split UVs in any case at hard edges but this way we could guide the automatic UVs. 

Jerc

It's not the case yet but we'd like to add that option.

oglu

What about using selection sets from maya to seperate shells. Or material assignments? 

fdfxd2

What would be really cool for hard surface was if you could  use the auto uv algorithm for packing uv islands that a mesh already has, if someone is using a piece of software that maybe doesn't have the best uv packing algorithm.

Seeing a lot of potential here.

Shrike

I tried it for UVing but it looks like you cant get meshes out of substance without them having triangulated, that does really hard cap the usefulness of the unwrapping feature

Ex-Ray

Are there plans to allow user UV control after the auto unwrap? Will this be a fully fleshed out feature tool set, for example as mentioned by Shrike, address workflow issues like un-triangulated FBX exports?

It has great potential and I can easily imagine all the things I would want in terms of user experience and production workflow, but it all depends on what the scope of this feature is.

Jerc

Scope is ever-changing
But yes, we intend to make this a viable option for production workflows, so expect many improvements around it this year, this is inly the very beginning.

AutoRunFail

I unwrapped a low-poly cactus the other day and the consistency of the texel count was excellent. The one note I had was that there were some seams in places that I felt there shouldn't be, and perhaps an unnecessary amount of them. I was wondering if there was any way to adjust those seams or change the UV's manually in Substance (note - I am fairly new to Substance as a program overall, so I apologize if this is something that I should already know)?

danimal

ceen

Bumping this thread.

Is this a valid workflow for AR/VR Assets today? I am looking for a way to quickly unwrap huge amounts of reduced CAD data.

poopipe

No auto unwrap is actually as good as doing it properly by hand.

Only you can decide based on your needs whether its good enough for what you're making

Kanni3d

Also "VR" is a little ambiguous, considering there is mobile and desktop VR platforms - both with VASTLY different budget/performance requirements. Either would yield a totally different answer.

poopipe

That's sort of moot.

Auto unwraps are inefficient regardless of the platform, if you want to make the most out of the hardware you must do efficient things but if you can get what you need without being putting work into being efficient then why waste the energy?

Kanni3d

Heh yeah, no matter what you're end target is - having good UVs is always ideal for many reasons. I've just noticed people say "this is for VR" and expect direct answers, when there still is more questions past that needing to be asked.