Never mind. I just found the "Select By SG" option haha. For anyone that doesn't know it's in the Unwrap UVW. Under Selection there's Select By and you can select by Smoothing Groups there.
Aye, most of the time UV Tool and Relax does everything I could ask for. UV Peeler's really useful for winding pipes, though (although always choose the edge loop with the most even spacing along it because that's the reference it uses for spacing out the loops that go lengthways). A really neat trick (and another reason I…
Align the horizontal edge loops so that they're straight in the UV window. You could do this by just drag-selecting verts and using non-uniform scale to make them straight. I have a script to do this.
Wouldn't agree that unwraping isnt good for this sort of thing, in fact its just about the ONLY way i unwrap anything, ever! Because running an unwrap on something like this, relaxing, and then clamping the edges is a LOTTTT faster than doing a cylindrical unwrap, going back and tweaking every edge so you dont have wierd…
Yeah, but when you say "no smoothing" people generally assume you all your normals are averaged. So you havent found anything magical here then =) Talon: What i do for winding pipes/wires is just use the interactive relax, that way you can just select a few points, and pull it mostly straight, and then i clamp the edges.…
I thought wtf is it called, ah yes road kill has some very nice clamping tools. You can sort of do what eq mentioned in max already with relax, but it's not as nice in my opinion. Select the edges you want the seam to be at and break the edges. Relax. If you want a seam to be straight, straighten it and check keep boundary…
Ah word, what i do fits kind of a general everything useage, which means i can select edges on multiple objects and unwrap them all at the same time, instead of doing them one by one, which saves a lot of time. Tried playing with peeler a bit and didnt find it that useful, you've got to manually set up the size to get it…
Yeah, it only works on really specific cases, namely pipes. But it does them really well :P The mesh you use it on has to be a cylinder and only have nice strips of quads in it (tris and ngons and even gaps in the mesh fuck it up, annoyingly). But you select the edge loop you want and it'll pull it apart to get it to fill…
I keep meaning to write a script to do this, for both Max and Maya. As EQ says it's only really useful if you're unwrapping lots of things at once. These days I find that most of the "big name" apps all have fairly comparable UV tools. Max is lagging behind in some areas (namely failing to incorporate UV editing as a true…