Hello Everyone!
I am writing on this topic because it seems to not be mentioned anywhere recently on any of the community websites for Blender. As you know the UV tools and algorithms in Blender have been lacking for almost a decade and is falling behind for use in production pipelines.
Other 3d modeling software such as Maya have had their UV mapping tools constantly updated and perfected but i feel it is time for Blender to do the same as to keep up with industry standards.
I would do this myself if i had any knowledge or programming skill… but the best i can do is write this post to rally and inspire people who are willing to partake in improving the UV system in Blender either by producing addons or opening a new experimental branch!
Features i feel should be added and improved:
-New UV unwrapping methods and algorithms since the current ones are constantly
producing unpredictable results such as skewing or bulging for organic models (Characters, Creatures etc). This also makes it impossible to overlap mirrored UVs without fiddling with UV vertexes (snapping every single vertex one by one is really no fun).
-New tools for editing UVs such as new and improved Stitching and Mirroring tools that allow for further control over islands. Possibly it would be great if we could copy and paste vertex coordinates of entire UV islands to fix mirroring issues far more easily. Another idea is to improve the way you can edit the UVs of multiple objects in the same UV space. Possibly an outliner? Yes thats an idea!
-UV Outliner so you can select, hide, group and name the UV islands of the model you are working on to allow better management of the workspace. This would make the management of large dense objects a breeze to understand and alot less confusing.
-UV Tools that make marking and clearing seams a breeze for large and dense objects such as One-click seam marking, Edge-loop marking and Face Marking. Overall quality of life stuff.
That is all i can come up with but im sure somebody out there can come up with much better ideas than me. Thanks for reading this post and i hope i have inspired a few people out there to create and make Blender a better program. Cheers!
i think the problem there is no available developer to work on it even volunteers…the guy who worked on SLIM algorithm didn’t finish it and the code is pending for years now…we need a new
It need a smart&fast uvpacker; a better auto-marker for seams; and uv islands must (optionally) avoid any sort of ‘stretch’ effect on their entire area. Houdini show the road in those aspects.
A lot of the alignment functionality in the TexTools addon ought to be standard native tools. It’s virtually impossible to do efficient game-ready UV layouts without them.
Yes ive seen this. It was posted right after mine lol. Its a step forward and hopefully we will get something that can be added to the master branch in the near future. Fingers crossed!!
Also UV Pack Master is absolutely worth the money. No question in my mind there. Already saved me days worth of work in first asset I used it on , and paid for itself.
Character artist speaking here, recently left MODO after using for 10 years in favor of 2.8 The uv tools that I’m seeing so far in blender scare me. need some serious work please.
I Super 100% agree with op. Please blender engineers, please make the most kick ass, hell yes uv tools. I’m really loving blender so far. Loving it. But the UV, topo tools need serious attention.
I agree with you blender really need a lot of love in the UV department and since i know it is not going to come anytime soon i just bought rizom and with the blender bridge it’s fine.
That was one part of blender that make me cringe since UV is such a long and tedious process and in blender it was a chore to be honest.
Fortunately a few addons alleviate this but we are far from what i would call an efficient UV pipeline.
I saw this tweet from the UV Tools GSoC guy about it. I found an archived wiki page for the old GSoC project here, but it’s a bit of an eyesore to read.
Regardless, definitely will be some much welcome improvements, hopefully!
By default, UVEditor seems completely empty.
But if you enable Magic UV addon provided with 2.80, it should look less scary.
Other addons mentioned into this thread should reassure you, too.
But UVediting inside Blender is completely dependent of addons, a more solid basis would be welcomed.
UVeditor suffers also of same problems that 3D View encountered with active tools. No select tool and transform tool available at same time.
If you want to be efficient with new UVTransform tool gizmo, you have to make a selection through a shortcut.
Contrary to 3DView, UV Editor does not have a gizmo popover to display a transform gizmo while Box Select is active tool.
Hi. I think the problem is that meantime it needs
a development grant for minumum one, realistic 2 years to reach an usable state.
Good thing is that the EPIC and UBISOFT sponsoring could used for that because of UV unfolding for materials and lightmaps is the everyday need in this buisness.
In addition to Magic UV, TexTools and UVPackmaster i use
RizomUV with Blender bridge and Ministry of Flat with own Blender batch export and import.
Last two paied versions show off very nice the complextity.
e.g.
MoF shows off that the best algorithm for unfolding are many who simulate artist workflows and knowledge. Took him several years to land there.
Last 2 close to fulltime.
However it works.
I did 3 very detailed car interiors with it. Normally i needed manually 3 to 5 days. It does it in less than 10 seconds without reworking stuff. Even the baking of the complete interiors showed no seams at all.
So from my side this is the way to go.
It s more analysing your geometrys and fireing more than 20 standard algorithms for the analyzed result.
Low hanging fruit and good start would be to integrate Xatlas… it s OpenSource and i think one part of MoF too.
I could not agree more. When i opened Blender 2.8 and more or less saw no progress i just lost hope… I love Blender and think it’s amazing that so many people are doing this for free but the way Blender handles UV could use a massive improvement. I made my own plugin called Smart UV that will be ported soon, the problem is is that many of the features that i wanted to have in there have not been developed yet. It’s a work in progress thought and many good things to come.
That’s cool. Question, how do you learn to code for Blender? Been a bit curious about the process and maybe an add-on developer like yourself could shed some light on that.
I pay programmers to write my addons, i only design them. I am an old 3d artist myself that used to freelance in the game industry so just created what i needed for work. It’s hard to write this without sounding smug but my understanding is that most people that work more proffesional with 3d especially with UV mapping are missing features the most in Blender. The uv editor really need some serious rework. I loved the preselection i saw in the beginning. I have been trying to add something like that myself.
