I thought to mention this wonderful looking UV unwrapping program, Headus UVLayout. It’s currently at beta stage but already looking really promising and useful.
Basically it is a program designed to automatically unwrap and optimize your UV layout for minimal distortion after you mark the seams on the object. Frankly I haven’t seen this powerful UV layout optimization to be available in any other 3D program.
PS. Does anyone happen to know that program (or any relevant program as handy as that) that they are using in their videos to show what mouse and keyboard buttons are pressed… that looks very handy for video tutorials.
It looks pretty similar to what’s available in Blender to me (with the exception of the stretch colouring). And by the looks of it, and the fact that they say ‘dynamics-based’ algorithm seems like it might even be using pelt mapping, which probably isn’t as good as ABF. It does sound like there are some nice tools though, like brush tools for pushing and pulling UVs etc.
Don’t get me wrong, Blenders UV unwrapper is one of the most powerful unwrappers around, even when including commercial software, but there is almost always need for some pinning and further tinkering. It just looks really easy to get those distortion free and symmetrical UV isles in those UVLayout demo videos.
I suggest that you guys look all of those videos they have on their website. That first video that I linked is from year 2005 made with their old program version and showing just the bare basics. There are some really neat and handy looking features in that UVLayouts new versions (like direct welding of UV isles without needing to mark seams again etc. etc.). And to think that this is still in beta stage, I’m surely getting this if the price will be reasonable.
Maybe some of those features could be “borrowed” over to Blender
@Howitzer: Really? I haven’t ever even tried wings unwrapping tools. Although I have been aware that it has one… Hmm, maybe I’ll give it a shot.
