Flattening of deformed/curved mesh can be tricky, so this operator can help a little.
It is using active UVMap and “applies” it to selected faces, flattening it in more controllable manner.
It can be helpful if you need to preserve face distirbution during flattening or perform “limited bending” toward flat presentation of your mesh, utilizing Blender power to generate and edit such unwrapped presentation
Some screens to show-off the idea:
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Curved mesh:
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UV map using “Follow active quad”
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Flattening, driven by this UVMap. Here it is 100% flattened, but you can set any other percentage (to get limited bending that follow mesh curvature)
- Source: https://github.com/IPv6/kristallum/blob/master/blender/addons/sculptHelpers_v02.py
- Operator use last selected vertex as “anchor”, flattening will happen around its position in UVMap