Couldn’t find more information about the transform tools behave different in Sync Mode.
Face Selection : The moved faces always get cut off the existing UVs.
Vertex Selection : The Vertex stay connected but also influence vertex on other islands.
I don’t want this two modes. I just want to move faces and vertex, without cutting them off, or influence points on other isolated UV patches. This is also expected behavior, I call industry standard.
Now, I can understand that cutting of could be an option, but the behavior with vertex makes no sense.
Anyway, is there some smart way to disable that unusual strange behavior? Add-on ?
Quit Sync Mode.
UV Sync mode is a synchronization between mesh selection and UV selection.
So, if you select one vertex, you are selecting 4 corresponding UV Vertices.
But that also means, if you select one UV vertex → you select corresponding mesh vertex → you are also selecting 3 others UV vertices. That is a logical loop.
But when you select a face, you are not selecting UV edges, you are selecting corresponding UV face. So, there is a rip when you move.
By switching to edge select mode, an interior face will stay joined. But a boundary one, will have other edges selected, like vertices.
So, the workflow is to use this mode to make selection in 3D, obtain corresponding selection in UV Editor, quit UV Sync mode, select all in 3D, deselect what is annoying in UV Editor and work as you want with mode OFF.
That is no answer to the question. Also this work perfectly well in other application.
The function is not even correct in non sync mode, because vertex mode works the same.
Also I see no reason why the 3d viewport shouldn’t be used for selection. Indeed its very useful.
I never used a non sync UV editor. There is no benefit in my opinion.
That’s exactly the answer and AFAIK the default. Moving faces or vertices without cutting them off… you also can use the the Sticky Selection modes to differenciate between shared verices or locations or not…
Well… then you might just not know… ? Have you tried ?
In non sync mode, default sticky selection mode is Shared Location.
You can disable it to individualize UV vertices.
Same behavior as in Sync mode would be Shared Vertex sticky selection mode.
I don’t say that. I am just saying that you have to switch between modes, if you want to use it like that.
I would also prefer to have one mode.
But feature was built like that, in Blender.
In non sync mode, selection in Viewport is used to manage display of UVs in UV editor.
Using an addon will not change those basics of UV Editor.
There are some small tricks but in general the whole UVing process in Blender sucks.
The Sync Mode is as stupid as X-Ray selection. Why do I need to select the center vertex of a polygon… that all slows down modeling a lot
Anyway. The main problem is, that when I select in viewport I have to toggle sync mode, then in order to edit the select vertex toggle sync mode off. Doing this like 100 times, just to manipulate a UV map is nuts. There is no reason why Sync mode should behave differently. It was introduced back in 2.79 in order to react to massiv critic and its done silly.
Again, that reminds me to object manipulation in Outliner, that is synced to object visibility. The logic is, they are visible in Outliner. You can only parent objects whit disrespect of their local position. Who is consulting developers to do so many stupid things?
Don’t Blender devs hear to real 3D Pros? No wonder why everyone goes back to the classic apps, once knowing Blender.
Sorry for ranting, but I think someone should teach Blender how software has to follow workflow, not the opposite way. I think they should stop listen to people with less then 10 years professional 3d experience.
If this would be so easy… but the problem with “only” listening to people who does have ten years of experience in something and are used to use some things in a special way is:
Different people are fond of different approaches… so Maya people “fight” vs. Lightwave people vs. MAX…
…and you always hear some other opinion after you had listened for weeks, month or years…
Finally there would be no new innovations. And also there are such silly things like patents on progress bars… …and any open source project wants to avoid any costly struggles… with this much less money as the classic apps…
I think using the words “nobody” or “everyone” is almost ever some kind of unsustainable overstatement ( that’s the reason why i added almost ). If someone does not know something then someone just do not know everthing to know for sure and then claiming to know everthing… well… i do not know anyone to say so… and here we go in circles…
Thankfully everyone is free to choose…
( I for example would love it if the UV editor just uses a fixed orthogonal 3D view so that almost all the “mechanics” and tools are the same as i’m used in 3D… expect panning instead of rotating… )
The problem is, there is near to no discussion. We all know that Blender needs a lot essential stuff. Like a Material manger, a layer system a new hierarchy system, a mightier Outliner, better UV tools, etc.
Blender has a lot work to do at an area users of other apps seeing a missing of standards.
This get always criticized as back ward thinking, while Blender goes new way.
It doesn’t. It goes shortcuts and leaves the real work to the next generation. People wanted groups and layers in Blender 2.8. They didn’t got both, but collection. Least work, not a solution, but good enough. Everyone still complaining got ignored. Now, how do I put objects from different areas on a layer and make an alpha mask for my rendering. Not possible, ignore him!
Layers could give Blender Light Linking. This was one argument. What did we get, a small layer system that is only for Light Linking, instead of a global system. So, its possible, its just not wanted.
No, that is false.
UV Sync selection exists since fusion of Edit Mode and UV Face mode in 2.46.
UV Sync is helping to identify what UV Island corresponds to what part of mesh.
When it is done, you can make most of selections directly in UV Editor for a transformation of UV Map in UV Editor. For those operations for identified UVs, UV Sync mode is useless.
I see it completely different @Okidoki. First how bad would it be, if a discussion about how a tool should be always ends with: everyone likes other approaches and oh this is a free world and who says that even if our approach is really less efficient, we should never start to rethink it even if there is another common and widespread method - who knows. we could end up with something better ourselves some years from now.
Blender is pretty alone out there with that selection method and its implications on how uvmapping is done and personally I am also no big fan of how it has been approached .
Infact its maybe the worst part of blenders uv mapping. Its finicky and prone to mistakes. Datastructurewise a uv split means vertexduplication and as that it has also its influence on continuity in terms of interpolation and texture aliasing. This should not be an implicit result based on positional aligment or misalignment. This should be an explicit operation with a clear visual feedback of how the current state is. Currently we have this abstruse sync mode toggle, where we mix just implicitly controlled vertex splits, uv hiding and selections in different viewports into a mix that somehow works, but really cant live up to other ways to do it.
( I was interrupted several times… so i had to revisit this post multiple times… so it may be a bit… straining (?) to read…)
Surely the UV editing is not the best part of blender… but only telling how good some other app is or how bad blender is also doesn’t really help. In the case of blender being open source… anything is possible…
I never suggested that…
…but rather that it should not start that way…
According…
?? I’m not sure if i understand this… because AFAIK the UVs are for every vertex per face and not for any face… because you couldn’t do something like this:
if the vertices shares the same UVs… (any corner of the cube could have only on color and not one color per face)… so what’s that about split… ??
Again AFAIK the toggle between synced or un-synced UV editing are just editing possibilities: someone changes for a selected 3D-vertex …
all UV-vertices for all included face-vertices
only the UV-vertex of a specific face-vertex
…and it’s even possible to use the shared vertex information or not… (sticky selection)
So even if i do not remember completely how this was done in 3D Max (and it several names) or Lightwave when i used them for a small time long ago ( even a litttle bit of Cinema4D and also ? Modo… Silo ?? one of those fancy modeler which was nice but i used Wings3D then)…
…i can barely understand the real (unsolveable ? ) problem here…
Anyway…
Because also other apps do have some history according to the behaviour of some features… and the users “get used to them” while using it… someone might think this is the only way.
That’s what i meant with:
But i never mentioned something like blender being easy, intuitive or better… just like the other apps… different to each other… and if some tool does the job better or someone is so used to it that it’s just faster (and better)… fine… use it…
So even since i used different tools over time maybe someone can increase my knowledge about UV’s in general.
…
Or someone may even know a very nice UV-addon for blender ? Like for example…
The whole sync mode on/off makes absolute no sense. If I want to edit just parts I can hide and unhide elements. And edit them. There is simple no argument that tells why a vertex of UV island get selected of another UV island. The UV Editor is not the viewport. And even if that Vertex is part of the island it get selected in Sync Mode, but when turning it off not. That has zero to do with the viewport. Its just a lazy stupid developer who didn’t care about the needs of the people. That it. And it need to be changed, because there is no single need for two modes. Its completely absolute. Select the code, delete it write it again without the switch toggle nonsense. Case closed.
Wow thats a long post. I dont have that much time so I cant comment on everything. Another thing is that ,my interest in participating in discussing this here is fading as the tone really changes, but basal assumptions in your reply are wrong. So I’ll comment on some of them and try to ignore the rest of your figtht.
Yeah its simply not like that and thats a bit the problem. If you dont know why and how uvmaps are built less redundant its hard to see the problems that arise from how blender does it. If you’d have a uvmap without any seams you’d just have as much uvs as shared vertices and not as much as vertices per face. But for any vertex thats part of seam you have two uvs. Thats why the amount vertices that are part of a seam doubles. So even if a dcc manages it different internally and works with much larger redundancy, thats not the target state you work when you unwrap or what you get in an export. And as I wrote in my previous post its not even just about the effiency of the export result, it even has impact on how the texturing process works with the texels of the different textures used.
Thats why seamplacement is important and why the how is important aswell, and in blender especially how manual tweaks and edits keep that seamplacement intact. Thats not where blenders synced unsynced selection editing hiding, implicit splitting mix shines.
And eg accicental splits that you might not see in blender ( or generally the sum of uv duplications) can have recognizable influence on the visuals of renders and heavy influences on performance in realtime scenarios. Thats why its important how you edit uvs efficiently and robust. And thats why I wrote about the problems above.
And quite some of other tools do it in a much more similar way compared to how blender does it. And I also wished blender would be more inline with other tools in this regard. Its really simpler and with less errorprone that way.
I initially wrote quite more, but decided I’ll better stop here.
(What I wrote is really not meant negative, I hope you got it that way.)
Original this was about the “unusablity” of the UV editor in blender… however…
I think @zeauro answered this perfectly… but then… It is what it is…
But now…
…and all this about beeing a problem (only?) in blender… ? I can’t follow that (and what this have to do with the initial statement…)
Referencing en.wikipedia wiki UV_mapping:
UV coordinates are optionally applied per face.[2] This means a shared spatial vertex position can have different UV coordinates for each of its triangles, so adjacent triangles can be cut apart and positioned on different areas of the texture map.
with ² a reference to Murdock, K.L. (2008). 3ds Max 2009 Bible.
So what MAX did already in 2008 is now inherently wrong in blender ??? Somekind of split is needed because UV islands would overlap otherwise… Also:
In fact this already happens with the standard cube without explicitly marking seams…
But again: this is a different topic and does have nothing to do with:
First I thought I was clear enough that you please leave me out of that fight you two have. I have a hard time to judge who of you two was taunting more.
But you reduce the whole topic two just two inappropriate comments he said. What seems the only thing you were after. And even I dont like how he presented his point, its not that seldom that people get too emotional when frustration is present. But I was against your as taunting reaction cause what he says has some aspects that are worth mentioning.
And I was really just referring to your post, not zeauros, he simply gave an unbiased description about how it is in blender. Thats great, really NOTHING wrong with what he said. Two thumbs up. I commented just on what you said.
And still your dont understand what we are talking about, nor how the things are. Yesterday you had the strong opinion that unwrapping was just positioning uv-verts where each face having a separate tuple for every facecorner. Today you did a short lookup found something about spliting uvs and post that as if it was a point against anything I said or even just your own argument. But its neither opposing what I said nor is it the point of the crit.
UV splitting is the process duplicating the 2d-vertex that represents the texture coordinate if more then one position has to be stored. Its not more and not less. And yeah its almost always needed, especially for closed meshes.
But in blender the process of manual uv edits is nestest and combined with other operations in the tools and modes we are talking about.
Things like hiding uv islands, splitting and moving/tweaking, splitting, rejoining . And splits and joins are are caused IMPLICIT !!! It can happen by chance if you place two islands that are meant to be separate to close to each other. Do an export after you gave two verts the same pos and you see what I mean. And THAT is what almost every other tool does different. They simply dont couple the mentioned operations in mutual exlusive operation modes and they do splits and joins only explicitly and not locationbased.
No, thats why this all is just a single topic. Its about the workflow and its usage robustness. Its preferrable to have different explicit operations for hiding unhiding, selections in 2D and 3D, moving tweaking elements and splitting and joining.
not getting into the argument, but i did find it interesting how different formats deal with UVs… in obj files, for instance, the UVs are stored per face, but in LWO they store by vertex (in the same ‘section’ that other vertex weights would be stored) with some trickery to get around the verts that effectively have 2 UVs (at seams).
(now UVW mapping … that doesn’t sit in my brain well. )
Personally i didnt see absolutely any reason to dealing with unwrapping in blender because yes, “sync mode” are one of the most wierdest and dumb idea in blender. Absolutely impractical and confusing bs and even worst - its constantly interfere with unwrapping addons.
So sorry its not a solution for the problem, but as a recomendation: switch to RizomUV/UV Layout.
With a bridge addons its really quick to throw your model back and forth.
Im personally leave blender unwrapping only for dealing with trimsheets with Zen UV addon.
…and any open source project wants to avoid any costly struggles… with this much less money as the classic apps…
). If someone does not know something then someone just do not know everthing to know for sure and then claiming to know everthing… well… i do not know anyone to say so… and here we go in circles… 
one of those fancy modeler which was nice but i used Wings3D then)…
I dont have that much time so I cant comment on everything. Another thing is that ,my interest in participating in discussing this here is fading as the tone really changes, but basal assumptions in your reply are wrong. So I’ll comment on some of them and try to ignore the rest of your figtht.
)