UVWMap Gen

MattLichy

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxbp-Q1nVjE[/ame]


This looks awesome . Might be slower than some methods for certain tasks, but I wonder how the hell he's doing this... Max really needs to overhaul its UV methods.

keizza

oh my.........

Treacharous

This looks really cool, what is the name of this plug in , and where can I get my grubby paws on it.

renderhjs

its a nice tech video but it doesn't look very productive yet. Headus Uvlayout and blenders or Modo's LSCM / ABF are a lot faster or instantaneous - no need to wobble and wait seconds to minutes to have it relax in its final shape.
But every attempt at a better UV unwrapping is nice as it puts more pressure on AD to tackle the UV editors in booth max and maya.

MattLichy

Yeah, I agree it's not as fast as others, like I said.

But I'm wondering how he's doing this. Do you think the plugin is calling an external exe that gets the UVs imported?

Edit:


http://www.polygonal-design.fr/

This app actually looks like one of the best Unwrapping programs I've seen. But I wish max had alot of this built in.. I don't want to have to export objs and work like that.

renderhjs

MattLichy: the controls are horrible with that one, it was one of the earlier tools that just specified on unwrapping. But it has a very bad workflow and just ugly navigation imo. Nothing beats headus in my opinion so far it just has the smartest shortcuts and UI navigation and most powerful features just can't praise it enough for the things it did and does right.

pior

Hey Render, how does Headus compare to RoadKill ? I am always getting awesome results out of RK (launched from Maya) but never had the chance to compare it with other UV-specific tools besides Max's and Maya's default - I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this.

Bal

Yeah that looks pretty, but I'd hate to have to wait all the time for stuff to unfold itself, it's one of the things that annoys me with UVLayout as well (very powerful and versatile app, but just annoying to learn, and a bit slow for simpler stuff).
In the end I just continue using Roadkill Pro in Maya, Xray Unwrap in Max (and normal Roadkill when I need to move/pin/unpin areas around).

I used unfold3D back in the day, was ok. The newer version looks fine, but I think it's a tad too expensive, when I already have good free (or very cheap) solutions available.

r_fletch_r

+1 to Renderhjs. Headus UV Layout is just about the best i've ever used, I havent used Roadkill but I'm familiar with LSCM from Blender and Silo.

What wows me about uvlayout are a few of the key features:

Topology based symmetry: you just tag an edge in the center and symmetry is active.

Local Scaling: For areas like ears, nostrils, and lips where there is a large surface area in a comparatively small space you can manually override the scale of the region. local scale is stored on a per face basis and can be smoothed across the mesh.
Its great for keeping complex things like faces as one clean island while maintaining an acceptable level of distortion.

Edge Straightening: you can tag edge loops as straight lines, this is damn handy for hard surface models.

SubD unwrapping: When this is enabled the unwrap automatically compensates for distortion caused by meshsmoothing.

Packing: The packing has a neat feature called boxes, basically it lets you arrange your shells into groups which stay together as the packing is solved. Packing the main uv area doesn't effect the packing in each box, it arranges the boxes. I find i get about 50% coverage with max's packer, where i get between 70 and 80% with uvlayout.

rumblesushi

Impressive, but looks more like a fun toy. Reminds me of a verlet cloth simulation.

r_fletch_r

?? Thats like dismissing visual studio as a colourful letter. So far as cloth simulation id imagine your not too far off.

Bigjohn

Headus is probably the best. But can't beat Roadkill's pricetag of free. Plus, 99% of the time 3dsmax's built-in unwrap is good enough. Pelt+relax is really all you need.

I did see a video of one of the unwrappers lately that had something like a Density Map, where you paint areas that are important (like the face), and the relax gives them a higher area. I wish Max had something like that.

Numerator

I wrote an unwrapper and I perform a distortion check on the charts as they grow to try and keep the ratio of triangle area to texture area consistent. A good UV wrapper should do this so you don't have to paint the areas of high density.

MattLichy

I might have to checkout Headus then. Yeah, alot of these apps get to be damn expensive.


That guy also made the MadCar Plugin, which is freaking awesome, but now its not free. You can get a free version though for Max 2008/2009.


This is in done in the viewport in realtime. You can drive around using the keyboard or moue or a joystick/pad.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7TI-afxhL0[/ame]

I don't know how he's doing this, but this is awesome

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLL29BnJwbk[/ame]

r_fletch_r

Madcar is great fun. we used it in a few shots at my last job. we had to do a few traffic scenes. I think we must have spent 3 or 4 times the time it saved playing with it

MattLichy

Yeah, I want to almost make a track in Max and race around it, haha. Or make some sweet ramps or something, and put some fumeFX Explosions in there.

sprunghunt

how is this different from using relax in max? It seems almost the same except for the realtime update.

MattLichy

Not really any diff, well besides not having to stop the relax, rotate, relax, and maybe redo that a couple times to get it to completely go.


Just thought it was cool that he is using some sort of external app or link in with max to get the UVS to transfer and be manipulated like that. Might be able to completely re-build a new UV editor that way then.