3DS UV Tools
interpolator
So, I'm working on an art test and messing with 3DS (as opposed to Maya) for the first time. Modeling was easy but now UV mapping in confusing the hell out of me. Maya seems to have these in depth tools for aligning, relaxing, move and sew. Does Max not have any of these or am I just blind? If you guys have any useful insight or good links to share I would be most appreciative.
Replies
Max's Relax tools are considerably better than Maya's. The only thing Max lacks which I'd like from Maya is the "Map UV Border" tool, but just using Max's Relax overcomes this 99% of the time.
You'll find it in Tools -> Relax, set Amount to 1.0 and Iterations to about 200, hit Apply and your UVs will be magically perfect. Leave "keep boundary points fixed" off unless you want to preserve the UV shells' borders.
Move and Sew is worse than Max's Stitch Selected tool, go to Tools -> Stitch Selected, if you set the Bias to 1.0 then it will scale/align the smaller UV shell perfectly. Maya's Move & Sew never scales things properly, so if your UV shells aren't already the same density, the resulting shell will be distorted - this doesn't happen in Max.
As for aligning, while Maya does have a bunch of decent ones out of the box, I've written some scripts for Max which I put on hotkeys for aligning/spacing UVs on the U or V axis (or "collapsing" them).
http://www.greveson.co.uk/scripts/mopTools.ms
Also check out CrazyButcher's LCSM Unwrap script, much better than Max's Pelt.
http://www.luxinia.de/index.php/ArtTools/3dsmax
And James Haywood has some similar alignment scripts, plus a couple more.
http://jhaywood.com/maxScripts.htm
Edit.. MoP you should also point to your Normalize UVs script, very handy that one.
http://www.chuggnut.com/Scripts/TurboUnwrap/TurboUnwrap_Max9.rar