3DMAX 2010: Is it possible to scew uv's similiar to photoshop transform tools?

Millah

Just as the title reads. I'm mapping to a pre-created map and being able to adjust Uv's similar to to how photoshop allows transforms would be great.

I know I could transfer the uv's to polys and then warp them using ffd's etc. but I want to know, is there something out there that lets me do it in the UV editor?

Thanks,
- Justin

Mark Dygert

I think I understand what you're after... Try the Freeform mode in the UV editor window, its up at the top by move, between scale and mirror.

It will Allow you to scale it by grabbing the corner box and rotate it by grabbing a box on the edge, you can adjust the pivot point by selecting the + in the center and moving it where you need it to be just like photoshop... more or less...

TexTools have some great tools also.

Millah

Hey Mark,
Thanks for the quick response. I already use those tools. Here's a picture of what I'm talking about. Imagine the white dots are the positions of verts changing in UV space. I know that I could use soft selection or convert to poly but I always wonder why I can't just modify the uv's like this in max.

Millah

Perna, are you saying other packages allow this type of uv deformation? I'm curious as to what ones?

Mark Dygert

Ahh yea, warp mode, I thought you meant transform mode. I don't know of any other app that has those specific warping handles. The convert to mesh and manipulate is probably the only good option inside of 3dsmax.

That would be pretty cool! If you find good work around, definitely post it! But I think you already came up with it =P

[rant]
I agree with per, its annoying the way they handle UV editing in max. Not only should it use the same codebase, tools and shortcuts, it should be independent of the modifier stack. It should be a separate mode you can invoke at any time, (like Maya). It's sometimes a logistical nightmare to do UV edits on a stack that must be maintained, like with morhpher modifiers, animated modifiers, skin bla bla bla... such a pain.
[/rant]

renderhjs

like perna said you can swap UVW with world XYZ space and then use any modifier to change it, once done swap it back:
in TexTools its this button:

Millah

The issue is that I have a texture setup within the edit uvw window and I want to warp the uv's to fit it in various ways while at the same time having the texture visible.

While I can do the UVW to world XYZ swap I then have to make a texture plane the same aspect ratio to match up exactly to the XYZ geometry. Really it's not a deal breaker and the workaround everyone's suggesting isn't the end of the world, but it is just that-- a workaround so I figured I'd ask in case there were tools out there.

Actually, now that I think of it, if the UVW to XYZ portion of textools included an option to also create a plane that had the current visible texture on it that would be pretty slick.

Mark Dygert

Mountains of MaxScript would cease to exists if they ever handled it that way... Tech artists everywhere would probably weep tears of joy as they hastily re-wrote everything they have ever written. I'd get behind a fresh start if the promise land looked like that. One mesh type, what a beautiful thing that would be.

Millah, what about creating a plane and unwrapping it to fit the UV space and attaching it to your mesh. In theory when you convert it will be the exact size you need?

Millah

Ah nice idea Mark! Thanks everyone.

Millah

I’m using textools like was suggested, but ran into the following issues:
1. I lose the UVS when converting from UVW to XYZ in textools . I setup a plane attached to the mesh I'm unwrapping and map it to fill the uv space (000 to 111) but the uv's are lost when running the textools script which means my ref plane needs to be manually remapped. I’m guessing this is so that the data to switch back to 3d is stored. I wonder if the that data could be stored on a different channel so that the uv data can be maintained or something like that?

2. textools uvw to xyz doesn't seem to take into account what aspect ratio I have setup using custom bitmap size options (both within the edit uvw window and the textools window itself. It just so happens that this map is 1x2.

3. Even if I ignore both of the above and go in and apply edit polys and FFD’s, when I click to swap 3d back to UV my uv’s are not accurate. They are close enough that a little bit of scaling gets me back to where I was, but on meshes with many uv shells this constant need to tweak everything would be a nightmare (especially in regards to normals). Not sure what I’m doing wrong with that.