UV Unwrap control

Support Modeling
1

Hi everyone,
I’m wondering if there is a way to control the polygon distribution in the unwrapping process in blender ( I mean the “Unwrap” command).

For example, if I have to unwrap a head model and i want just one UV island, i mark just one seam from the top of the head to the back of the neck. Unwrap does a pretty good job (Better than I can do with just one click in Maya).

The problem is that I need more texture resolution on the face area than the neck and the back of the head. Is there a way to control the algorithm so that the face polygons are bigger in the uv spaces and the neck/head back polygons are smaller? I don’t know, maybe using weight paint to control the texture resolution distribution.

Thanks in advance!

2

you can use ‘live unwrap’. first pin some ‘vertexes’ with P, then check the ‘live unwrap’ box, then move one or more of the pinned vertexes. personally, I would make more seams, and multiple islands, because with blenders texture painting, there are no ugly seams, provided there is a slight margin between islands in the UV editor.

3

You could use UV sculpt or UV proportional edit to get different area distribution between faces.

@Modron Some game engines use to double vertices where unwrap is separated in islands if i get it right.

4

Thanks both! It took some practice to understand how live unwrap worked, but this is great! Very nice workflow! By the way a wheightpaint driven unwrap would be a nice Idea to add to the feature wishlist, don’t you think so? How can I suggest this to the developers?

5

By the way a wheightpaint driven unwrap would be a nice Idea to add to the feature wishlist, don’t you think so? How can I suggest this to the developers?

Of course you can suggest it to Anthonis Riakiotakis. (the developer of the texture painting branch and the UV sculpt additions.
However, try the UV sculpt tools first. They may need some further fine tuning, maybe some auto functions.
They work just fine. This is the tool you need. There are a lot of interesting parameters. Like pinning the outline of a UV island etc etc .