Hello!
I'm trying to unwrap the UV's of this pan, and I'm having the following issue with the "Straighten Selection" feature in 3DS Max's UV Editor:
In brief, I'm trying to straighten these UV islands circled in red, but the Straighten Selection tool messes everything up, as can be seen in the far right. I could place some seams in order to isolate the pan holders, but I'm trying to keep everything on the same island. It seems that the Straighten Selection tool only works if the UV island is all quad and uniform, which is not the case. I also tried the "rectify" option in the textools plugin, but it didn't help me at all.
my goal is to make everything as straight as possible but maintaining that rounded shape of the pan holder, looking similar to that "Ideal UV" drawing on the image above. So is there any way of making this in 3DS Max? Any scripts or plugins?
Replies
select the outer edge as so... (in editable poly) and use Create Shape from Selection.... the in the uv editor select the faces you want to map and select the wrap::spline option.
in the new dialog you have a pick spline option pick the created spline and set mapping to planar....
and voila
This is what got following the method you mentioned:
So, unfortunately, doing that is very time-consuming, even though this is indeed a possible solution. I had already been in a situation where I had to unwrap several meshes with similar issues, and what a headache that was! As you said, Straighten will only work with full quad strips. And I'm aiming for a solution that allows me to straighten even non-quad loops. Maybe there's a script than can do that, but I couldn't find it on my own
Having perfect UV's is something that will always take manual effort anyway, scripts/plugins only have so much "logic" when it comes to unordinary situations.
Worst case/fastest case, is to just leave out the stitching step. Faster, but you'll just have some extra seams here which may or may not be ideal in your situation, depends on the asset.
Following other folk's suggestion, I could solve this problem in RizomUV, which worked quite nicely. The only manual part was selecting the edges I wanted to be straight, apply a Horizontal Constraint to them and then, press unfold and optimize. This could be a little more straight on the sides of the island. I can always manually straighten them up, but I think this is the best I can go with little effort:
Ideally, I should be able to do this in 3DS Max, without having to rely on external tools. But if someone knows a solution for that in 3DS Max, I'm open to hear!
By the way, I have a high-end hotkey pad specially designed for UV editing (haters gonna say this is just a regular keyboard with a bunch of tape on top):