Hi all, I just wanted to pop in the question…
Has anyone tried this plugin ?
Their screenshots/video demos etc… look pretty impressive.
I like the concept of nearly perfect uv space distribution to avoid texture distortion on a single organic shaped mesh, however saving space by rotating and moving bits around (the packing process) is a less interesting matter to me (as I would for example “merge” another object into the map to use some spare pixels wherever I want).
These steps don’t seem to be available separately : as soon as you hit “Apply” … youpidou! Bang Boom! in 1minute calculation Unrwella does the job without human mistakes, that’d have taken you half an hour by hand!
But in my case I only obtained messy results and never managed to get the quality they claim : I’ve got a 4legged animal with pelt seams properly defined, somewhat cylindrical mapping all the way around its body as a start : as soon as I bring the Unwrella Max modifier on top of it : it re-splits everything like every single triangle apart :?:
Yeah uvlayout appears to be the best (but dodgy UI).
The magic algorythm behind is called “Least Squares Conformal Mapping”.
Blender’s got it built-in, I quite like this simple plugin for 3dsmax though : http://www.luxinia.de/index.php/ArtTools/3dsmax
Editable Polys only for now : I’d love to see that thing working on patches btw, for my lod production pipeline (source code kindly provided by Christoph Kubisch aka ‘CrazyButcher’).
Usually I tend to prefer simple plugins rather than standalone apps just for the sake of avoiding another import/export pass in a pipeline… (but I guess that’s how some people can make money by selling yet another third party software)
Another vote for UVLayout from Headus. Good balance for generating baking friendly UVs and artist friendly UVs. Works well even with sloppily made 3d objects.