3DsMax: UV along Splines.

Incomitatum

I have lots of cables, ropes, wires, and even gutters in a scene I am working on. These things are already modeled and compressed into Editable Polys. I am wondering, how would I unwrap them, QUICKLY? The textures are small (some only 64^2), and need to repeat along the shape.

Any suggestions? I seems like a basic thing that I should already know, since I have been using max for years, but this one is getting under my skin.

Any help is appreciated.

((Yeah I tried doing a search first, came up with a lot of great pimp threads with ropes and cables and whatnot)).

Noors

There's a spline option in the unwrap. you need to generate a new spline from your mesh though. Maybe with the pelt ?
textools has some useful tools too http://www.renderhjs.net/textools/

Now the dirty way i do it quickly :

planar mapping
select one uv edge
loop
break
relax
select one horizontal uv egde, ring+loop, align horizontal
select one vertical uv edge, ring+loop, align vertical
swear to remember to check generate mapping coords next time

renderhjs

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyX7iZlrrAI[/ame]

Mark Dygert

This won't help you now, but going forward think about your UVs as you're building.

Make your pipes, wires, ropes and tubes from splines and auto generate UVs it might mean cleaning up a few areas here and there because you will more than likely make mesh edits but it still might be easier than trying to unwrap after the fact. Still the methods renderhjs and Noors outlined should help you out now.

To get the spline in the video that renderhjs posted, you can normally select an long edge and click convert to shape. Or you can use a spline painter script to paint a spline down the surface of the object. Graphite modeling tools had one included in 2011.

If you're on an older version check out Soulburn's scripts he has a great object paint and spline painter set of scripts. Personally I find it a bit better than what they included in 2011 but installing scripts can be a bit of a pain.

Incomitatum

I am having to reinstall Max today. Does the Auto generated uvs for a spline have a setting about how many times you want the texture to tile? I don't intend for the UVs to fit in 1 UV space.

Mark Dygert

It's in the spline menu under the Rendering Rollout check the box that says "Generate Mapping Coords." This will give you some pretty nice square UVs that fit in the 0-1 space. You can scale and stretch them however you need to make them tile.

If you turn on "Real-World Map Size, it will more than likely generate something that doesn't need to be squashed, stretched or scaled and it should match decent textel density, but that depends on how the scale and units are set up.