Other Idea, pack selected island inside the actual UV Layout, without to change the rest of islands.
Oh yeaaah, +1 to that. Can also use pinning, not sure which way is better.
@SaphireS great work!
I would like to suggest a little improvement in UV windows and I wonder if other users have the same opinion.
Sometimes I feel the need of a more precise grid snapping in the UV workarea, it happens when I work with hardsurface and “geometric/graphic” textures, then I feel the need of some more precision in vertex snapping.
It will be nice (and consistent) to have a snapping model more simlar to the 3D windows one (pressing Shift or zooming allows for smaller snap steps).
Do you think this will be hard to implement? And do you guys think this can be useful?
thanks.
Interesting thing about the low snapping resolution, I checked it myself and it’s not very useful indeed. Since I haven’t touched upon transform code I can’t estimate how much work it is, but I’ll try looking into it.
@Partial packing: This sounds useful but is definitely hard to do, so no promises here. I’ll check how it fits with the planed pinning of islands during packing.
I’m so glad to see bullx also mention the snapping issue, i can’t believe I haven’t noticed that before recently, i always thought the snapping could be changed to a smaller size but apparently not, those 8 steps are all we’ve got.
That will be huge relief if there’s anything that can be done! Thanks again for the great work! 
Aidy.
Have UV shapekeys been brought up already ?
Have UV shapekeys been brought up already ?
No, first time I hear about that idea and UV Shapekeys sound very interesting! Definitely out of the scope of this gsoc though since this unfortunately is some bigger effort.
Thanks for the build tungerz 
, although there’s not that much to see yet. I’ll try to post a build whenever I need feedback and testing for a bigger feature.
uv (morpher)shapekeys, something like the slideknit script for 3dmax:
would be very usefull for creating seamless objects, and add objects to complex round surfaces.
http://www.simonfuchs.net/tutorials/skinwrap/skinwrap.gif
Attachments
Thanks sergiopt, that’s quite different from what I imagined. It doesn’t fit in the schedule for this gsoc anymore, but I have the impression you can achieve the same results with projection/shrinkwrap for the time being?
https://developer.blender.org/rBa2bb48080d59879b43309ae5c27e9ffda053a4d8
Really happy to see this one. Looks almost identical to Maya’s “normalize” tool, which I really miss in Blender.
Hehe I wanted to post this tomorrow with my weekly report, I even created shiny .gifs 
I’ll try to also upload a build after some cleanup-work, would be great if people here could test the feature!
Just checked Mayas Normalize, it indeed does what I’ve implemented with “Scale to bounds”. Do you guys think it should also be called “Normalize” or “Normalize UVs” in Blender?
Scale to Bounds does seem to say it all, I guess people from other tools would understand Normalise UV’s perhaps a little quicker? personally 50/50 on the name, really looking forward to having it in Blender though, :yes:, thanks!
My report for week 3 can be found here: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:SaphireS/gsoc2016/reports#Report_.233_for_UV-Tools:
Some highlights:
*Finished the “Select Shortest Path” operator for UVs. While the implementation of the path computation itself was rather straightforward, some code refactoring in parametrizer.c had to be made to make it work. Parametrizer uses triangles for faces, so I had to tag diagonal edges of quads to counter “face-stepping” behaviour for example. I included the otion to use the topological distance, similar to the bmesh operator. If checked the minimum number of steps is used instead of the minimum spatial distances. An animated .gif can be found here: https://wiki.blender.org/uploads/0/07/Shortest_path.gif
- I implemented a “Scale To Bounds” operator for UV islands. This is also known as “Normalize UVs” in other software packages. I has the following options:
** Keep aspect ratio: If checked the aspect ratio of the selected uv islands is preserved
** Individual: If checked the individual uv islands are all scaled to fit the bounds, otherwise the selections are scaled as a whole
An animated .gif can be found here: https://wiki.blender.org/uploads/5/5f/Scale_bounds.gif
- I made incremental snapping in UV editor more precise, previously only 8 snapping steps (per axis) were the default, I doubled that amount. Also while holding shift the snapping interval is halved again for even greater precision.
I’ll try to upload a testbuild the next few days, would be happy about some feedback!
i know shrink modifier very well and is not possible achieve (precisely) like the slideknit addon for 3dmax.
blender dont have any feature like that he just dont have advanced features for modeling precisely complex hard surfaces.
I apreciate alot your preojects and contribution for blender, keep going.
Ooh, scale to bounds will be useful. I used to place the cursor in the corner and scale all with pivot at the cursor while eyeballing it.
I think is not really related to uvs but yes, shrinkwrap is not related to the uv. Having a tool that convert uvs into a shapekeys would be the best!
You should be able to do same thing with duplifaces without needing a shapekeys animation.
But for a shapekey animation, you can try to export your UVmap as an SVG, re-import it as a mesh through AI/PDF/SVG import addon and join this mesh to original one as a shapekey.
I see how this UV shapekeys can be useful, I was merely suggesting an alternative until someone (maybe me after gsoc) implements it. 