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Welding UV vertices

Hello everyone,

I came across a problem when trying to make a new piece in an architectural set, a brick corner cap for a building. Here's the gist of it:

XSigZjL.jpg

Now, for each side of the corner, I simply selected all the faces, did a planar mapping, and then relaxed the UVs so that the sides parallel to the plane got some space instead of just being lines. This worked fine for the right side, but produced strange results for the left side - the UVs folded over themselves and became a total mess. So I thought "I'll just deselect the top and bottom brick on the left side and do the planar map/relax process, then weld the faces of those bricks on manually."

Well, that worked well for getting me clean UVs for the left side. But now I'm having a heck of a time actually being able to actually weld those faces back together!

8ty8cVj.jpg

You can see here the verts I'm trying to weld together. Their edges are green instead of white, though, and weld does not work, even though these vertices are connected & welded in the actual geo. I can't simply stitch them: since several of those faces are rotated 90 degrees from the UV faces, they just revert to being flat lines once stitched, which is no good. Even if I use snaps to overlay the verts exactly on top of one another, the weld is unsuccessful.

I'm stumped. What's my problem? Why am I unable to weld these vertices?

Replies

  • peanut™
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    peanut™ polycounter lvl 19
    Did you tried ctrl-T in the UV editor with a vertice selected and drag it on the target, its 3dsmax after all. its easy as pipi.
  • Flatlander Woman
    Yep, I tried Target Weld already to no avail, unfortunately.
  • peanut™
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    peanut™ polycounter lvl 19
    Overlapping polygons in a projection ? why oh why ?


    Linetool.jpg
  • Flatlander Woman
    Sorry, I'm new to this & a little confused. I didn't think the polys were overlapping, just joined at an edge. I thought that was kosher... should I be unwrapping this some other way?
  • peanut™
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    peanut™ polycounter lvl 19
    I'm stumped. What's my problem? Why am I unable to weld these vertices?

    You can't weld these vertices because they dont physically share anything (3dsmax is telling you it doesn't make sense). Unwrapping is like modeling but in reverse, you can't weld overlapping stuff.

    What i do when working in the UV editor is, i select an edge (or vertex)and look closely at where his shared twin sits (3dsmax will slightly highlight the edge or the vertex) ... and then at that moment i know its a shared compound and target weld it.
  • peanut™
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    peanut™ polycounter lvl 19
    Should I be unwrapping this some other way?

    Maybe your confusing something here, we project boxes, cylinder, and spheres. But we unwrap character faces and cloths. Both are similar but way different

    ie: we can walk, or we can run, similar but different.
  • Synaesthesia
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    Synaesthesia polycounter
    Or you can enable Show Vertex Connections from the display menu in the Unwrap UVW options. IIRC, you can't weld verts together that aren't welded on the model itself, even if they're physically sitting on the same point in space.
  • Flatlander Woman
    Or you can enable Show Vertex Connections from the display menu in the Unwrap UVW options. IIRC, you can't weld verts together that aren't welded on the model itself, even if they're physically sitting on the same point in space.
    Hmm, what's confusing to me is that, as best I can tell, these points *are* welded on the model... if I drag a vertex at the intersection of those edges, for instance, both edges get dragged around with it. I didn't think it was a simple issue of construction, but I could be mistaken. I will give the Show Vertex Connections thing a try when I next get a chance, thanks!
  • Eric Chadwick
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    Max often creates UVs in 3 dimensions, U V and W. If your W values are really far apart, this can prevent UV welding. Switch to UW, flatten on W, switch back,try welding again. Does it work now?
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