UV autoseams and UV Gravity packer addons

Autoseams addon is good for quick UV unwrap.
It is especially good on chaotic meshes, like scan results, decimated meshes and others, where manual seam selection is slow.
On regular meshes, it produces not-so human likeable islands.
On highpoly meshes, could be extremely slow.
Still, it’s the best auto UV solution in many cases.
It tries to produce islands that are nice in more aspects - shape, deformation, area.

Gpack, gravity packer,
is an experiment, to enable interactive UV packing in blender. Blender only has a box packing solution by now, which is quite bad. I don’t use this in production, but I release this for inspiration.

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That packer is the most playful thing i have ever seen! Would it be possible to implement this for the normal uv editor without switching modes?

It would, but much more complicated.
Best thing would probably to use PyBullet. If the way would be still through Python.
Also, a real solution is proper packing algorithm, I currently do my packing in 3d coat and it’s simply much much better also than this… so I don’t see me investing time further into this solution (even if it’s a lot of fun ;))

Yeah i understand, I am working on a lot of tools for my new toolbox for the UV editor that i think will be really great. But packing is really not worth it in Blender, it would take ages to fix. What i am gonna try to do is fix the basic functions so that they work way faster. I will keep you posted for sure.

That’s really good you are working on this. You also might be interested in this:
https://developer.blender.org/T48036
the guy will be presenting on the conference, so there’ll be stream of it.

That UV packer is one of the most creative methods i have ever seen! Adds a bit of fun to what is usually a pretty boring part of the 3d workflow, i really like it! :slight_smile:

The auto seam addon is really usefull, could be great on meshes that dont have regular edge loops or meshes that are mainly composed of triangles, as manual seaming on these meshes can be very tedious at times.

Thanks pildanovak! :smiley:

pildanovak - interesting results. I wanted to code something like that in past, but I had no time. I’m not sure how hard it would be to add those features:

  • locking physics rotation
  • ability to simulate few random inslands distributions, storing best the result (the more result the best, but It would required increasing simulation speed I guess)
  • ability to disable physics on selected island - and tweak it manually (grab,rotate, scale)
    -ability to earthquake the ground :slight_smile:
    UV with this addon is fun!

Finally some fun in UV workflow ! That’s quite brilliant, would be nice to show a “score” of space filled with geometry.

Thanks to everybody for positive comments!
It’s always a surprise for me when I throw something from my harddisk on the internet :slight_smile:

Hi Jose :slight_smile:
your post made me quite happy :slight_smile:
You will be surprised but big part of what you write is allready there, I just didn’t put it into the quicktutorial…

  • with S you can lock object physics.
  • W wakes up objects/ islands.
  • You can disable island rotation in the settings.
  • earthquake is sort of the bottom bar, where by clicking it shakes the container. However, shaking a bit more could help!.
  • margin has to be set before running the game, because of physics unstability when changing it in realtime :frowning:

Storing more solutions is a good idea, I didn’t think about it in this version. I know many packing solutions work like that. e.g. the one which was implemented this year as Google summer of code project (still hope the guy gets it finished, I think NFP is the hardest part of that algorithm and he has that working well…)

Sure things could become more usefull with that, now I consider it still a game, although I sometimes optimize my pack with it.

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That could motivate those lazy 3d artists! I know those guys, they just love to play and when they are supposed to make a proper UV layout, they get soooo booored! (just like me :))

Yeah UV mapping is not exactly why i paint. I really wish in the future som new tech will arrive that replaces uv mapping and somehow save the information in some other way.

Do you know about ptex ?

Actually i was just thinking about that, I have heard about it but never really understood what it is about.

Ptex basically assigns an individual texture to each face as you paint, therefore removing the need for UV’s when painting a mesh :slight_smile:

http://blog.digitaltutors.com/understanding-ptex-is-it-the-future-of-texturing/

I see, but what about the drawcalls and especially the vertex count? If each face is seperate the vertex amount should get insanely high right?

I think ptex renders everything in one draw call?

quote i found online -

Everyone keeps citing hardware, but what specific problem needs to be overcome? It renders everything in one draw call, it can even call spec and normals from the same file and it supposedly takes the same amount of ram, so what am I missing. It seams the benefits are huge and roadblocks are minimal, or am I overlooking something?

Source - http://polycount.com/discussion/86938/realtime-ptex-applications

Something that will not work for me is that you can’t really edit the hand painted texture in Photoshop. Also reusing parts of the uv, and that will make the painting process even longer since you have to paint all faces. But for some occations it is really bad ass. I really love painting on the objects in realtime 3d. Thanks for the info Jamie!

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing

HaHa! UV Tetris! That’s fun…

more about ptex: http://ptex.us/

I’m getting this error while trying to enable the gpack addon: