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twocust
Posts: 77
Joined: 25 Feb 2006
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Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 9:30 am Post subject: Horizontal/vertical point snapping |
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Howdy Phil,
It would be nice to be able to "tag" one point as a pivot to set the other vertices
to "straighten to" (whether it's just one vertex more creating the edge, or multiple
vertices and the user wants the whole thing straightened). Maybe there could be
the possibility to have a toggle for straightening vertically or horizontally.
Example:
Got some doors that I want the doorjamb edge to be straightened (since when
flattening, UVLayout wants to spread out the bottom):
and here's how the actual door looks with grid on:
I realize I can try to solve this by pinning before flattening, but I just thought it
may be of use to beef up the straightening ability a bit, since it is very handy
for more hard-surface type objects.
cheers.
twocust |
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headus Site Admin
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Joined: 24 Mar 2005
Location: Perth, Australia
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Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 6:30 pm Post subject: |
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Ahhh, OK, I see what you're after. I'm thinking of a new toggle in the GUI, under the Snap panel, that you could tick if you want Ctrl-MMB point moves to snap to vertical and/or horizontal alignment with adjacent points. I'll see if I can get that into v1.15.2.
In the meantime, you can do a couple of things already that might help. Turn Snap on, and adjust the grid if required, then move your points around with Ctrl-MMB; they'll snap to the grid when they get close to it, so that's one way of getting your edges perfectly vertical.
Or you have to option to not flatten that part of the mesh in the first place. Detach it in the Ed view as usual, drop it down into UV space, then just leave it like that. It doesnt have to be flattened to get UVs ... if you just drop it and leave it, it'll still have UVs, and they'll be nice and square.
Phil |
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twocust
Posts: 77
Joined: 25 Feb 2006
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Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 7:53 am Post subject: |
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Quote: | I'm thinking of a new toggle in the GUI, under the Snap panel, that you could tick if
you want Ctrl-MMB point moves to snap to vertical and/or horizontal alignment with
adjacent points. |
I think this would be handy. If you implement the shift-s for verts, that already seems
quickest for multiple verts along an edge.......but for vertex-to-vertex alignment your
suggested option seems to add better specific control.
By the way, I foolishly didn't know that just dropping to UV-space would properly
export out the UV's in that projection....I thought that if they weren't flattened then
they weren't functioning (since no texture-grid showed unless flattened). Dunno
if this might be something to promote so more folks know they can just directly
project their UV's if that's what they need (they're flat already, so no need to run
"flatten" on them).
Kind regards,
twocust |
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headus Site Admin
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Location: Perth, Australia
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Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 5:13 pm Post subject: |
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twocust wrote: | ...since no texture-grid showed unless flattened... |
Ahhh, true ... I'll have a think about that, because the idea behind not showing the grid on unflattened shells was to make it obvious what had been done, and what was left to do. But I can see now, for these "hard" shapes, that it might be handy. Maybe a toggle in the Display panel would do the trick ...
Phil |
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twocust
Posts: 77
Joined: 25 Feb 2006
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Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 8:54 pm Post subject: |
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or even just coloring the grid differently for non-flattened groups? (still see
the checkers or numbers, but it's yellow or something)
not trying to make things any harder for you...maybe even just stating it in
the docs would be enough? (I actually read the docs when I first started using
UVLayout...contrary to some of my previous behavior with software )
cheers.
twocust |
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twocust
Posts: 77
Joined: 25 Feb 2006
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Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:31 am Post subject: |
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couple of things coming up with trying to UV a building with ledges...
-would be nice to be able to connect "unflattened" pieces with flattened ones
so as to have straight projections connected to those that are not.
-would be nice to straighten within pinned borders along an edge. in other words,
I flatten a projection (had to flatten because when I dropped it to UVspace, it
turned into a "line" and not a top-down projection) which then bulges slightly
(because of the outcropping ledges of the building geometry), but I'd like to
have perfectly aligned vertical and horizontal edges within the flattened projection
and manually lining everything up is prone to error and quite tedious...
perhaps UVLayout is not designed to churn out hard-surface projects and I just
need to switch to another tool for this type of work. I'm just so enamored with the
way it works on organics I'm trying to make the same magic happen on non-organics
regards.
twocust |
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headus Site Admin
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Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 5:44 pm Post subject: |
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twocust wrote: | ...would be nice to be able to connect "unflattened" pieces with flattened ones... |
OK, to do that you do need to flatten all pieces you want connected, but dont hold down the 'F' key, just tap it when flattening the piece whos shape you want unchanged. UVLayout will squash it out, and enlarge it by 50% (it'll most likely turn blue), but you can then scale it down with Space-RMB. You might want to pin all points with Shift-P on the boundary, or Shift-P in clear air and then stretch a box round that shell. You can then weld it to other flattened pieces, and it should keep its shape, if you do any more flattening, because of the pinned points.
Quote: | ... but I'd like to have perfectly aligned vertical and horizontal edges within the flattened projection and manually lining everything up is prone to error and quite tedious... |
But cant you do this already with the grid snap and new edge straightening tool? I am going to to do that "line up points vertically/horizontally" thing we talked about above, but snapping corner points to the grid then the edge straighten between them should do what you're after I think.
Quote: | perhaps UVLayout is not designed to churn out hard-surface projects |
True, but I'm learning that people are using UVLayout for all sorts of crazy meshes I didnt have in mind when I wrote it :-) I'm currently working on some hair for someone, made from over 200 poly strips, trying to reduce the amount of repetitive manul work required to flatten it out.
Phil |
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twocust
Posts: 77
Joined: 25 Feb 2006
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Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:10 pm Post subject: |
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hey Phil,
thanks for the responses. I'll try the "tap and re-scale" method for joining.
in regard to the straightening, I wasn't able to straighten an edge inside
the mesh itself with shift-s and double-tapping 's' once points on the shell
edge were selected (only works for straightening edges that are outermost
on the shell, unless I was doing something wrong).
twocust |
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headus Site Admin
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Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:23 pm Post subject: |
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Ahhh, OK, I understand now! You want to straighten within a shell, just like you said :-)
Hmmm tricky ... about the only way currently is to use the 'g' hotkey to select a strip of polys from side to side, detach that with Enter, then straighten the edges and weld it back in. It would be very time consuming if you had a lot of edges to do though.
I'll have to think about this one a bit ...
Phil |
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