How to group similar parts of a mesh on a UV map?

Hi,

I have a mesh of something mechanical, so there are lots of tubes and knobs and so on that are identical copies, but the mesh as a whole is not symetric. Yet I want every tube to have the exact same UV mapping, and every knob to have the exact same UV mapping and so on.

My current method is to unwrap, then stack all the “identical” islands on top of each other, then weld the vertices together. This is a lot of manual tedious work though.

Is there a way to tell blender that each tube or knob should map to the exact same spot as every other tube or knob? For example, knob-1-vertex-A should have the same UV coord as knob-2-vertex-A and knob-3-vertex-A, and knob-1-vertex-B should have the same UV coord as knob-2-vertex-B and so on.

Thanks in advance!

try this
Haven’t used it for UV mapping before, but it should work in theory.