Best auto UV unwrap?
Hello everybody,
I'm a beginner at 3D stuff and in these days it's first time in my life I'm facing the true pain while unwrapping UV. So I'm thinking about perfect auto unwrap program that would make my life much easier to live, but the truth is, there is no such a perfect program.
However, what I know there are some programs able to somehow unwrap UV, and here's my question for you, super-pro guys. What is the best program that can automatically unwrap UV? What would you suggest?
Thanks for your answers, this is my first post and I hope it will help me, or somebody else.
Again, thank you guys.
I'm a beginner at 3D stuff and in these days it's first time in my life I'm facing the true pain while unwrapping UV. So I'm thinking about perfect auto unwrap program that would make my life much easier to live, but the truth is, there is no such a perfect program.
However, what I know there are some programs able to somehow unwrap UV, and here's my question for you, super-pro guys. What is the best program that can automatically unwrap UV? What would you suggest?
Thanks for your answers, this is my first post and I hope it will help me, or somebody else.
Again, thank you guys.
Replies
Headus has some very very good tools for complex hard surface objects built from many shells.
EVERYTHING IN IT'S PLACE!
Gives great results.
Should try that myself sometime.
...and has this playing in his head when he's unwrapping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Fv5cuYZFC0
My personal method: Take into 3D coat, define seams, hit unwrap, bring back into 3D app and tweak any distorted areas. Job done!
Seems everyone has a 3rd party app to start it though ?
http://www.3dtotal.com/tutorial/3d_studio_max/perfect_uvs_by_pelt_mapping_in_3ds_max/pelt_mapping_01.php
Usually I'll create the seam down the middle/back of the head, but never do a seam across the forehead from side to side like they have. I tried it out a sec ago however and it seems to allow you to maximise more UV space which is handy... I guess if you're covering the seam with hair anyway its not such a huge problem
It has a lot of the funtionality that UVLayout has except for the very advanced features like show overlap, pinning and packing boxes
Also how do 3D Coat's tools compare with UV master?
- BoBo
We usually place a seam in the middle of the chin and another one goes up to the tip of the nose. These two are kinda mountainous areas and would produce too much stretching if not cut.
We cut up the rest of the head to maximize UV space usage. Generally a standalone head model has to include the neck down to the level of the clavicles, because facial animation requires access to those areas so we need to include them in blendshapes.
Looks sorta like this:
Also, movie VFX creatures with larger skin areas are usually unwrapped to a lot of 4K or 2K layouts and some more complex shaders are used to allow easier management of the textures. This means that the artist only has to load textures for the area that's being painted, and the renderer can also manage data access more efficiently. Seams are also reasonably simple to hide in offline rendering with proper texture painting and render time filtering.
Usually not good, but depends. Most materials use the UV mode that wraps when it gets to the edge, so the texture tiles if the UVs go over. This means along the edge it will filter in some of the colors from the opposite side of the texture. So UVs touching the edge can cause seams.
If you can change the UV address mode to Clamp instead, then it won't filter the other side, instead it just stretches the edge pixel colors outwards. This is what Clamp mode looks like.
You have clearly never needed to mirror anything or unwrap something from the side (planar)
Lately though my UV editor of choice is Modo. It feels like magic.
Though from what i've seen, the new unfold3d algorithm Maya 2015 is using looks pretty smooth. I've always hated Max's modifier stack based workflow.
Mirroring UVs is a real pain, though. I can never get the built-in mirror uvs script to work right.
I also sometimes relied on UVs for some fine adjustments on character faces, where facial wrinkles were refined during the sculpt and texture pass. I was able to refit the mesh and even do modeling changes to have the edges align more closely, improving the blendshape work down the road.
We also use proxy models for reflection passes and to get proper bounce light on characters. More simple geometry allows faster renders, and we can keep the textures and use more or less similar UVs to reuse them. Also not possible with Ptex without some extra reprojection work.
a few dedicated UV programs and plugins, scroll down to "3d texture coordinate software" section:
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryTools
and some UV tutorial links to best practices and stuff:
http://wiki.polycount.com/TextureCoordinates?action=show&redirect=CategoryTextureCoordinates