What tips are there to save space on the UV layout?

Gooner442

Hi all,

I'm currently unwrapping a scene for the first time in 3D Studio Max and have a few queries I hope you can help with.

What tips are there to save space on the UV layout?, a number of objects in my scene are repeated, I have seen that when I have instanced objects I only need to UV unwrap one of them to affect all. However, I have for example a number of bolts (first image) that were given a path deform and I don't seem to have them instanced so when I unwrapped them they all unwrapped individually which is a waste of space. Is there a way I can lay them out on one on top of another without doing it manually?

These attachments should explain my queries better, I know I can save a lot of space by not repeating UV's but not sure how, any advice appreciated or if anyone has any good tutorial links.





Thanks for reading

Martin

Justin Meisse

for a bunch of repeated elements, I usually unwrap the original first then duplicate, even if I'm not done with the overal UV map yet.

With those bolts, you should be able to copy & paste the UVs from one to another, just select one bolt, copy uvs, then select the rest and paste. You might have to paste each bolt one at a time, sometimes Max is finicky with pasting UVs.

For other elements you can just make them overlap by hand then use something like TexTools to align the verts.

Yozora

Justin_Meisse wrote: »

For other elements you can just make them overlap by hand then use something like TexTools to align the verts.

No, don't overlap by hand. Highlight all the shells you want overlapped and then use the align shells/verts buttons on the floating textools uv window at the top, it will stack them all together in 2 clicks maximum.

Gooner442

I wish I'd unwrapped as I worked but I'm learning mostly what not to do on this project!... I'm guessing the best option will be to do what you say Yozora, I have textools but not used too many of it's tools yet, thanks both for the help

Mark Dygert

You could detach the bolts, re-center the pivots (select the bolts, Hierarchy tab, affect pivot only, center to object or align to object), then unwrap a single bolt, then use Neil Blevins Object replacement script to copy/instance the new bolt to the position of all the old ones. It comes in really handy for this sort of thing.

Gooner442

Vig, I downloaded the soulburn scripts, is that what you mean?.. and I found an object replacer but it didn't seem to work, it didn't copy any UV information

Justin Meisse

Yozora wrote: »

No, don't overlap by hand. Highlight all the shells you want overlapped and then use the align shells/verts buttons on the floating textools uv window at the top, it will stack them all together in 2 clicks maximum.

groovy, I've been using in-house UV tools for a while now so I'm not familiar with all of textools features yet.

Mark Dygert

Gooner442 wrote: »

Vig, I downloaded the soulburn scripts, is that what you mean?.. and I found an object replacer but it didn't seem to work, it didn't copy any UV information

It replaces the objects that are selected. If nothing is selected it won't actually replace anything. So make sure to select all the old bolts before you click apply.

Here's a quick walk thru of the process:
- Select all the bolts and detach (as one single object).
- Then run "Object Detach" to break them all apart into separate objects (it handles the pivots really well)

- Unwrap one of the bolts, this will be your master bolt.
- Run "Object Replacer" set the replacer type to single object.
- Click "Pick The Obj To Replace With" and click on the bolt you just unwrapped.
- Select all the old bolts and click apply.

Gooner442

Thanks Vig, I'll try it later, for now I'm leaving those bolts alone.. I went about it a very tedious way doing them individually, it worked but the way you've explained will be much quicker