Does anyone know if there are any plans on the horizon to have serious preserve uv functionality in blender versions to come? Its pretty important for making game assets, as the texture is often made before the modeling. Does this concern Bmesh at all?
Thanks in advance
i think having preserve UV’s with the new bmehs knife would be very easy. the question is how much work would have to be done to have preserved uv’s for edge slide.
ah well I would expect the new knife tool to not trash the UVs of any face I touch haha. Yeah I was talking more about edge slide. Hell, I can’t even get blender to insert an edge loop with preserving the uvs anywhere other than smack dab in between two other edge loops. Also you can’t remove an edge loop without UV annihilation. I really like most of blender, but dammit its missing some of the most basic stuff.
After doing edge slide, you can enable ‘Correct UV coords when transforming’ in the Tweak Last panel (F6)
Is this what you mean?
The knife tool in bmesh does not destroy UVs for me.
I was gonna recommend this, but when I tried it myself on a cube it didn’t work. I’ve since figured it fails to slide the vertices on UV borders. (so on a cube it fails completely, if each face is an island of its own)
Also you can’t remove an edge loop without UV annihilation.
Since deleting an edge loop is really a hack combining slide edges and remove doubles (which causes other problems too, eg with edge tags) you can actually take advantage of the “correct UVs” setting. Call the edge slide operator once and check the “correct uv” setting. Then, when you call the “delete edge loop” operator it will remember that setting.
Yeah, it’s stupid. File a bug for it 
You can remove edge loops without screwing the uvs already, in latest builds with bmesh, by using Dissolve.
As for “UV preservation”, Antony Riakiotakis (psy-fi) has plans to do it: http://psy-fidelity.blogspot.com.es/2012/02/uv-tools-over-moving-on.html
I’ve been waiting for this functionality in blender for years and I think with the new bmesh builds it seems to working.
I can create low res lods from high res meshes and the UVs seem to be preserved. At least as good as maya so far
Perserving mesh data is one of the key-features of bmesh, try it with shapekeys, or vcols and you will see, even seams,crease and other edge flasgs are interpolated in editing mesh data
sweet. I didn’t know where this was previously. I didn’t think to check the tweak last panel.
I’m happy to hear preserve UVs is on the horizon.