I don't know if this has been dicussed before, please feel free to give me a slap if it has.

I was watching the video tuts on the discreet website;
http://www4.discreet.com/3dsmax/3dsmax.php?id=399
and in the second vid she unwraps the uvs of a model using the cloth modifier, simply pulling out where she wants the uvs to lie. My jaw dropped, it seems so cool and easy. Has anyone else tried it? Ive had a go at a few tests and it seems to work fine and its actually fun.. its the first time I've ever used that word about unwrapping uvs

edit; man using this thing on a medium poly model totally chuggs my pc, but its too tantalising to give up hope

Yeah, I saw a demonstration of this when they were Discreet were first debuting Max 5? Max 6? So many versions, I don't remember. They were deomstrating the technique on Sam Fisher. Very cool shit. Me and some friends have attempted to replicate the technique, and we've had inconsistent results.

Digital Domain has a similar technique using Maya and the springs thingy, (soft body deformers I think) Pretty impressive results, but again, we've had only inconsistent results, and it seems more applicable to high res meshes over lower res meshes, so I haven't devoted a lot of energy to the technique.

But I do agree with you, seeing it in action is VERY cool.

Cool! Thanks for the link to the vids...I'll watch 'em first before saying anything else though [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

LtEthe; yeah its the sam fisher vid I watched. I agree I've been getting inconsistent results too, but mainly I think because of system performance. Ive got reactor cloth settings that work fine on low poly objects, but when I have a go with a character it chugs, and tears itself to pieces.. maybe I just need to learn more on reactor first

If you're not using the university PC's, go download UV Help (free plugin) from http://www.microcan.nl ... it basically does the exact same thing (undistorting uv sections), but is a hundred times faster to set up and runs from the Edit UV's window.
Actually, I might talk to Brian about getting some handy free plugins like that installed on the Abertay 3dsmax PC's... although I dunno if it's worth it, it takes like 5 minutes to start it up anyway - and they don't save damn user preferences! So essentially I can't model at any sort of decent speed in the classroom without my keyboard shortcuts... heh.

MoP

To at least get your keyboard shorts available, why not save your user-prefs from home in a max.kbd/mnu/etc file and bring that to school on disk, MoP?

MacD, for some reason whenever I've loaded my preference files in university, it's taken about a minute (freezing max) before it updates with my prefs. And loading the Colors doesn't seem to work at all.
And since my flat is only 5 minutes' walk from the university building, I might as well just go home and model on my own PC while listening to music, rather than wrestling with the slow and unforgiving school computers [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

The problem with this technique, is that you will need to painstakingly go in and break free vertices exactly where you want the seams to be, which in my mind would take longer than just smacking it with planar maps and doing standard unwrap UV editing.

Hi Guys, I was one of the Discreet demo artists on the cloth thing.

Its pretty easy to set up, but to save time we had a script that simply detached the selected edges and pushed them slightly so they came a free a little first.

You need a ground plane to work with and you need to set the cloth so that its got a high friction (to stop it sliding on the floor), make it fairly stiff with intersecting edges off and voila.

Its fun to play with, but I still use mesh editing to do my unwrapping.