Relax UVW in 3ds max 7 sucks?

[Eric Chadwick]

I'm playing with the demo of max7, and am evaluating whether the UV relax function is usable for us.

It looks like the function is relaxing the verts only in UV space, and disregarding the XYZ positions... so I can't get a decent result with it.

http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/images/thumb_max7relaxUVW.gif (http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/images/max7relaxUVW.jpg)
Relax before and after. It should be pushing the green UV edge outwards, to try to match the XYZ mesh shape, but it seems to only relax inwards. Similar problem occurs even if the checkboxes are used.

Deep UV's relax is quite superior, it looks like they are using XYZ space for the relax... but apparently they don't support multiple UV channels, so that's not a solution we can use. We are using multiple UV sets in our models and we need to relax portions of each.

UVHelp (http://www.microcan.nl/home.htm) is the scripted relax tool everyone here has been gushing about (me incl), but it fails on large meshes. It also has trouble relaxing a selection of interior vertices... it disregards their neighbors, so the continuity is completely broken between the selected verts and the unselected ones.

Does anyone know of a third-party tool that does a good job, AND supports multiple UV channels? I can't believe Max7's relax is so bad...

[MoP]

I know, they've had about 3 years and versions of the program to make a working Relax UV's tool, and have totally failed.
I'm sure it can't be too hard to make one that matches Maya's features. I mean, if some guy can write a freely-available plugin in his spare time, what are the Discreet guys doing? Drinking coffee and playing games all day?
UVHelp is fine for me, it does get a bit slow on more dense meshes though.
Deep UV is awesome. Shame you can't use it.
I don't know of anything better than UVHelp for Max. You could ask the guy who wrote it to try and improve it... /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[Eric Chadwick]

Yeah I did, he wasn't happy about improving a free tool, considers it a form of advertising for his coding business.

I would use Deep UV, but then that means Editable Mesh and also juggling each of the UV channels into #1 for Deep UV then back out to their proper #s again.

Sounds like the only way to go. Besides investing in Maya!

[CrazyButcher]

probably the guy who wrote the script works on a plugin now to sell it /images/graemlins/wink.gif

[Eric Chadwick]

I have heard grumblings of separate advanced UV apps in the works, so we'll see. But Daddy I want it NOW!

Well, I did just find I can trick DeepUV into working with Editable Poly. Once it imports back, I stick a Turn To Mesh modifier below the Deep UV modifier and the coords pop into place. The >1 UV channels were untouched. But I still need to swap the channels in and out of #1 to work with them in Deep UV. <sigh>

[Jackablade]

I have yet to see a relax tool that doesn't completely mutilate the UV layout. I always seem to wind up spending an extra hour or so fixing up all the hideous distortion that relax leaves behind.

[Eric Chadwick]

Yeah, sounds like a common lament.

Actually now I find I don't have to swap the channels... I can just tell the DeepUV exchange plugin to use another UV channel. That's cool. Too bad it seems DeepUV is pretty unstable, crashed once on me today, and others have said it crashes often.