Looks neat, although...tbh, kinda looks like Silo's UV mapping only less confusing.
Website could be a bit better...
Whoah! I just looked at the prices. Total sticker shock.
They've been sniffing glue or something if they think a dedicated UV unwrap solution is worth 300$ to start when other free and cheaper applications do the same things and way more, just not as elegantly.
It's very nice, but from what I saw it doesn't seem to quite match Blender's uv mapping I reckon. Though some of the selection tools looky pretty nice.
I second the glue-sniffing comment. It might be nice, but is it 300$ nicer than Roadkill? Or for that matter, other programs' built-in tools or scripts, now that even max has pelt-mapping, and Silo's unwrapping-tools have grown up a bit more?
Yeah this looks like maybe a slight improvement over modo's too, really the only features it has are some good symm tools and rembering pinning. Those alone arent worth loading up a different app, and sure as hell not worth shelling out $300. Are max and maya's uv tools still so terrible that theres a need for these sorts of solutions?
It's packing ability looks interesting but not $300 worth of interest. And no Max and Maya's UV tools do not suck. The problem I see is that people don't take the time to learn them and rush for scripts or 3rd party apps assuming that if its part of the core package it has to be bloatware.
I still use a much earlier version of unfold and it works like a champ. Never had a problem out of it and its very very fast. I have no reason to upgrade
Whoah! I just looked at the prices. Total sticker shock.
Hey, gotta have some sort of show of "authority" by having a very highly priced product in the commercial 3D production market. If it were cheap, (mostly newbies and startups) people wouldn't even think about it being worthy of their time.
MoP: If you like that pinning stuff, check out the Silo UV tools. Only thing missing that I saw demonstrated is the distortion false coloring, and alignment options. Its a little wonky workflow-wise and I'm not really used to it, but very promising.
Leilei: I'm sorry, but...thats manages to make zero sense.
The idea that their marketing plan consists of "lets overprice the application to instill confidence in our clients" is totally silly. Especially considering that Unfold3D is THE MOST EXPENSIVE application in its niche, from what I could find.
We're 3D Artists. Not soccer moms shopping for raviolis. We download demos, evaluate the tool for stability and functionality, and THEN weigh that against price.
At no time is somebody going to go "I need an LCSM UV application...lets see what we've got here...oh! This one is the most expensive by far! It must be the best! Let me get my credit card..."
It's $400. I'd recommend buying a copy of Silo, pocketing the $250 you'd save, and actually get a good sub-d modelling and sculpting package into the bargain. Sounds like a no-brainer to me?
Also, you can get a pretty good approximation of the "pin and relax/unfold" workflow they demonstrate in Unfold3D, using 3dsMax with Soft Selection along with Relax. Just do an initial Relax on your whole UV chunk, then if there are trouble areas, just Soft Select drag them in the direction you want, then apply Relax - it will not affect the unselected regions, and will smoothly fall off along the soft selection, usually produces very nice unwraps of complex organic shapes.
Shame Maya doesn't have UV soft selection, it would be able to do the same I'm sure. Hopefully they've added it in Maya 2009, I haven't had a chance to try it out yet.
roadkill for me, thanks. get's most organic jobs done quickly with a nice preview, fast im/export into whatever app that an swallow obj's and the results can easily be tweaked back in the home app.
that price there is crazy for a standalone UV thingy. actually, sits well right next to crazybump.
This program looks f'n lovely. I agree on the price being too high though unfortunately. If it were USD I would be more open to it.
Roadkill is nice and I use it on every model. I wish the creator(s) would continue it's development though. It has so much potential.
Maya's "soft selection" has always been quite useless. I wish they would just implement something like Max had in like 2002. It's so useful for organic modeling which is what I mostly enjoy Maya for.
Maya's "soft selection" has always been quite useless. I wish they would just implement something like Max had in like 2002. It's so useful for organic modeling which is what I mostly enjoy Maya for.
hehe bpt had that workin in maya years ago, it'll come back as open source but not anytime soon
more like, open source as it should have been.
imagine what kind of modeller maya could be these days if that thing had spread like certain poly-scripts for max did back in the day. christ...
Hey Mop Maya has UV soft selection since Maya7 I believe! And definitely in 8 and 2008.
Whaat? How do you access this? I can't find it anywhere in the UV Texture Editor menus, or in the Maya Help.
Do you mean the Soft Modification tool? Whenever I try to use that it either doesn't work, or is so insanely fiddly that it takes longer to get it working correctly than to manually move the UVs...
Basically I just want to select one UV vert, and be able to Relax or Unfold with a soft falloff from the selected UV. I have looked for this in Maya 2008 several times and cannot find it.
it wasn't intended as open source from the beginning...
Maybe not Open Source, but Byron mentioned in the BPT Thread that he was intending to release the tools freely for everyone, but got talked into making them Paid Only by some people.
more like, open source as it should have been.
imagine what kind of modeller maya could be these days if that thing had spread like certain poly-scripts for max did back in the day. christ...
Exactly, BPT looked like it would be just that, but went the other direction and ended up not being updated any more for a loong time ...
But i guess this discussion is derailing the thread a bit .
thats not so true, he always planned on releasing them for payment (for schools it was possible to get it for free), as he back then lived from that, and pretty much only that (which wasn't that much after all), then he got into the industry and now he earns enough money to make it open source, but doesn't have the time to clean it up to release it, it'll come but not anytime too soon, right now he is working on MayaRV (spoken "are we"... ehem) and that comes first, well directly after the job of course :P
ok lets stop talking about that, thats not part of this thread
Both Max and Maya have "shortest edge path" tools, "point-to-point seam" stuff. Maybe not as advanced as Unfold3d, I'm not sure, but still very useful for marking out seams quickly.
Mop I think it is simply a matter of pressing the b key in the UV editor. It brings in a red circle brush behaving just like Maya paint tools. Funny how this was here for ages, way before soft sel was implemented for polygons!
Might not be exactly what you are looking for but it's handy nonetheless...
Replies
I'll probably try this out. Does it have a chuggnuts type feature?
B
that 'pinning' function looks nice
Website could be a bit better...
Whoah! I just looked at the prices. Total sticker shock.
They've been sniffing glue or something if they think a dedicated UV unwrap solution is worth 300$ to start when other free and cheaper applications do the same things and way more, just not as elegantly.
Looks a lot like headus UVLayout, only more user friendly, but perhaps not quite as feature packed. Price scares me, though.
And EQ: Yes... yes they are
I might look into writing a plugin or scripting something like that for Maya, seems like it should be possible.
Hey, gotta have some sort of show of "authority" by having a very highly priced product in the commercial 3D production market. If it were cheap, (mostly newbies and startups) people wouldn't even think about it being worthy of their time.
Yes I hate price judgment too
Leilei: I'm sorry, but...thats manages to make zero sense.
The idea that their marketing plan consists of "lets overprice the application to instill confidence in our clients" is totally silly. Especially considering that Unfold3D is THE MOST EXPENSIVE application in its niche, from what I could find.
(1 license price)
Unfold3D: $300-700
Headus UVLayout: $100-300
Silo 3D: $99-159
Blender3D: Free
RoadkillUV: Free
Chuggnutz UV Tools: Free
We're 3D Artists. Not soccer moms shopping for raviolis. We download demos, evaluate the tool for stability and functionality, and THEN weigh that against price.
At no time is somebody going to go "I need an LCSM UV application...lets see what we've got here...oh! This one is the most expensive by far! It must be the best! Let me get my credit card..."
Also, you can get a pretty good approximation of the "pin and relax/unfold" workflow they demonstrate in Unfold3D, using 3dsMax with Soft Selection along with Relax. Just do an initial Relax on your whole UV chunk, then if there are trouble areas, just Soft Select drag them in the direction you want, then apply Relax - it will not affect the unselected regions, and will smoothly fall off along the soft selection, usually produces very nice unwraps of complex organic shapes.
Shame Maya doesn't have UV soft selection, it would be able to do the same I'm sure. Hopefully they've added it in Maya 2009, I haven't had a chance to try it out yet.
that price there is crazy for a standalone UV thingy. actually, sits well right next to crazybump.
Roadkill is nice and I use it on every model. I wish the creator(s) would continue it's development though. It has so much potential.
Maya's "soft selection" has always been quite useless. I wish they would just implement something like Max had in like 2002. It's so useful for organic modeling which is what I mostly enjoy Maya for.
hehe bpt had that workin in maya years ago, it'll come back as open source but not anytime soon
more like, open source as it should have been.
imagine what kind of modeller maya could be these days if that thing had spread like certain poly-scripts for max did back in the day. christ...
Whaat? How do you access this? I can't find it anywhere in the UV Texture Editor menus, or in the Maya Help.
Do you mean the Soft Modification tool? Whenever I try to use that it either doesn't work, or is so insanely fiddly that it takes longer to get it working correctly than to manually move the UVs...
Basically I just want to select one UV vert, and be able to Relax or Unfold with a soft falloff from the selected UV. I have looked for this in Maya 2008 several times and cannot find it.
Maybe not Open Source, but Byron mentioned in the BPT Thread that he was intending to release the tools freely for everyone, but got talked into making them Paid Only by some people.
Exactly, BPT looked like it would be just that, but went the other direction and ended up not being updated any more for a loong time ...
But i guess this discussion is derailing the thread a bit
ok lets stop talking about that, thats not part of this thread
I tried roadkill some time ago, it has nearly everything i could ask for, but edge selection is a real pain sometimes.
it's not a big deal though, i just find this really handy : )
Might not be exactly what you are looking for but it's handy nonetheless...