using simple unwrap command on this simple examle, trying to understand what is wrong with Blender unwrapper algorythm, majority of other 3d software like 3d-coat, headus etc is able to provide results like on Fig2., however Blender for some reason is not considering the free space inside the circle which is quiet enough to put a cube in (see Fig1).
Of course i understand that i can adjust it manually, i could use projections etc… however… talking here about basic unwrapping algorythm and pointing out that this produces quiet unoptimized results which could be improved.
So if I have missed something - please advise, if not - developers?.. maybe its time to review and update?
I am not sure what you mean by optimised unwrap, and why is one preferred than the other? Yes I can see that it “saves” space, but what if you need to texture the square separately than the ring? Blender’s unwrap has quite a few options, have you tried packing islands?
Quiet simple: if you have 1024x1024 texture maximum (talking about game models here), then Fig1 UVs will utilize far less of that space than Fig2 UVs. Therefore on Fig1 model textures will look lower resolution than on Fig2 model. So the task here is to maximize the UVs in given texture space. Fig1 definitely is not optimized for that.
Packing islands is not solving the issue in given example.
If you want to texture square separately than ring - then it would be different situation, let’s assume that square and ring in this example is two parts of the same model and we want to use same texture on both of them.
So again, i understand that we can do lots of stuff manually and this example seems trivial, however, with this simple example i am pointing out the area where UV unwrapping algorithm could be improved to stay competitive in 2013
thank you, i know how to use project from view, that was not the point of my post.
the point of my post was to illustrate that simple unwrap lacks efficiency and in cases where we have UV islands with holes, those holes are not used for other islands (even if they fit in). That means that unwrapping complicated models will still have the same problem - non efficient utilization of texture space, while other programs like headus uvlayout, 3d-coat do that flawlessly. So to kill the need to switch to external apps back and forth for UV unwrapping i wanted to draw your attention to this problem and somehow motivate developers to review the UV unwrapping algorithm since obviously it can be written much more efficiently!
