Retardedly Dumb Question About Maya UV's

Irodex

Hmm searched for this but didn't find anything that answered my conundrum. Lets say I have a tube and I am UV mapping the top of it using a planar unwrap. Obviously I get this



Let's say that I wanted to make that circle now straight to save myself some UV space. How would I go about doing that? Am I UV'ing it wrong in the first place or is there some sort of script that can do it for me?

I have tried UVDeluxe and sdv_xform without any luck.

Thanks for answering my silly question.

snow

Hey! You would get some pretty shocking stretching, all I can think of is to break all the faces so they are all individual, then align each of the vertices in X (So the faces are pretty much squares), then stitch the edges back together. I guess that would take a couple minutes to do. Not sure on any script, good luck with it.

Sean VanGorder

Try this...

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/uv-strip-straightener

Oniram

!!!!!!!!!!!!!! wow Sean. thanks for that. its super cool! dunno if 2012 has something like that built into the new uv tools but its still awesome to have.

Sean VanGorder

No problem man, I found that a few months ago and have been using it ever since. Great tool.

Sean VanGorder

Also, I just re-read the name of the thread and realized you are looking for a solution in Maya....




So in that case, I have nothing, unless you wanna switch to Max

MikeF

max gets all the cool scripts

throttlekitty

I do it thusly:
Unweld an edge.
Take a few selections and rotate them so they're close-ish to being in a straight line.
Use the UV Flatten separately on each side, including the ends.
Unwrap on the interior UVs with Horizontal/Vertical checked, whichever is appropriate.

bugo

If you are willing to pay $20 there's this http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/marketplace/scripts-plugins/texturing/c/ninja-uv--2

There was another free solution, but I can't remember the name of the script.

m4dcow

I also use Ninja UV, but here is how I did it before:

Bal

If you think a bit more, there's a very logical (and fairly quick) way to do this, and it's what I always did before having scripts.

Just do a cylindrical mapping instead of planar, your UVs will become a flat line, then you just have to select the inner or outer UVs in the 3D view (fast way is to double click edge to select border edge > convert to UV), and move them up or down in the UV window. Obviously this technique works best on circles, so mixing around with the other suggestions can be better in many other situations.

bugo

It's true, both ways work. I usually do m4dcow way, but now that I think about Bal's way is even easier, thanks for sharing such a simple method.

m4dcow

Cylindrical mapping works well too, but I am weird and don't like eyeballing the ratios of different UV shells, so I tend to do an automatic unwrap so all the shells matchup with eachother fairly precisely and then start unwrapping things. Yes I know, it is a bit OCD :P

Bal

m4dcow, nah it's not OCD at all I do it too, but you can fix the ratios at the end instead, usually simpler, quite a few scripts do it for Maya (I think UV Ninja has it? I use Roadkill Pro myself).

m4dcow

@Bal UV ninja does have that functionality, but I guess I like to start off with things matching up for the most part. With the aid of scripts I have taught myself to fix auto projeections to my liking fairly quickly. For me it also helps me establish roughly where I am with a texel budget and whether I need to start mirroring or overlapping pieces etc...

throttlekitty

oh snap m4dcow, that's so much simpler.