Hello everyone,
I haven’t used blender in a while for modelling and animation and I came across this youtube video about UV texture mapping using Maya and there was this neat function they had which is unfold. Does blender have something similar to that?
Blender has unfold (need to mark seams first) I have no idea if thats the same as the maya one cos I’ve never looked at maya!
Blender has a bunch of different UV unwrapping tools, if you press u in editmode you will see all of the available ones (and most have settings to tweak them, looking in the operator panel in the toolbar after unwrapping). Unwrap uses the seams you defined, Smart UV Project is an automatic way of unwrapping, Lightmap Pack simply arranges all Faces non-overlapping (good for lightmaps, but not so much for texturing), Follow active quad uses the last selected already unwrapped face and tries to follow faceloops, the rest are Projections. For good results you should use manual unwrapping though, selecting edges and Ctrl+E->Mark Seams, then u->Unwrap. Some more useful settings can be found in the UV-/Image-Editor itself, check out all the options in the UVs menu.
Blender’s UV tools are considered by some, myself included, to be top notch.
The tools in Maya are cumbersome by comparison.
Check out the Blender Cookie video: http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/01/21/intro_uvmapping/
And here’s a link to new tools added after that video was produced: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.62/UV_Tools
The UV Sculpt tool is a personal favorite. I think only ‘Unfold3d’ has a comparable tool. And that’s 699.00 €
Speaking of ‘Unfold3D’, the so-called best and fastest UV map generator [according to their promo line], It doesn’t do a thing I can’t do better and faster in Blender. Truthfully, my unwraps are always better from Blender.
Yes, the UV tools in Blender are excellent, it’s the workflow where most people stumble. One does get used to it though.