How do you work with UVs that are wider then they are tall? (Like 512x1024)

madmuffin

I'm having trouble working with doublewidth UVs. The relax tool only wants to work like the map is perfectly square, thus relaxing into all the wrong shapes, and when I rotate objects, if they were scaled properly before to the 2:1 shape, the rotation causes them to be way too tall and narrow now.

Sometimes I can get Max to work so the relax tool and UV rotations and everything works just fine with the new width, but I have no idea what I did to make it work and I cant reproduce it for the life of me. Any ideas?

cryrid

While I'm not sure about Max-specific tools, in other programs you could just UV like normal in the 1:1 space (same ratio/etc as normal), and move other faces outside as if you were working on an imaginary 2:1 texture. Once you're all done, select every island and scale them in half horizontally or vertically as needed to fit inside the 1:1 square, apply the 2:1 texture and it'll correct itself.

sinistergfx

What I do is map to a square map, but utilizing -only- half the UV space (use either the bottom half or left half, whatever the orientation of you final map may be. The grid or a checkerboard-style map is useful here). Once I'm happy with the layout I apply a UVW Xform modifier with the U or V tile (depending on orientation) set to 2 to scale the UVs to use the entire space.

Mark Dygert

^ +1

The tools in 3dsmax aren't set up to work with a non-square UV space and will always behave oddly. I was hoping when they overhauled the UV editor the last time they would take care of that (and a handful of other super annoying things) but they didn't, hopefully they'll get to it at some point in the future.

Bunglo

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=87835

Same question, different thread, same info, more info, etc...

madmuffin

Lots of useful stuff. For the most part it seems like I just shouldn't try to work in 2:1 and only squish it at the final stage when its absolutely ready tweaked good to go.

pasha_sevez

If I plan to make UVs work with 1024x512 (for example) I simply pack the uv-shell in two nearest 0-1 squares and after that scale them all to 0-1 square. Works flawlessly and easily.