headus 3D tools

[Mat-Art]

Hi there, first time posting a question here.
Just wondering if there is a feature similar to Maya's Transfer attributes function.
I've made a character mesh at around 12k triangles, it has been unwrapped using the pro version of Headus UVLyout, all the maps/ textures are made. I'm now wanting to optimise the mesh to about half the value (so 6k), problem is that I'm using silo to optimise which leaves big holes in the mapping when collapsing edges. Does anyone know if a feature to transfer the coordinates from a higher res mesh to a lower res mesh exists in UVLayout? Similar to the Transfer attributes function in Maya. (I don't want to be downloading Maya just for this function)
Cheers
Matt

[GeoffRiley]

Hi Matt,

I'm afraid that there isn't any function that will automatically downsample the maps; I never attempted that function on Silo so I'm not exactly sure about it's result, but does it just throw away any pre-existing UV maps when you decimate a geometry?

If it does dispose of the old UV maps then it might not keep sufficient references to rekey the original UV map back in. The only way to be sure would be to compare the geometries and find the point commonality.

Maya can do the transfer because it uses it's internal structures which hold the mapping of surfaces between the original and decimated geometries.

It would be worth asking Phil to put it on the wish list for investigation, but I can't see it being a quick job because of the way that UV maps are stored along with their respective geometries.

Kind regards,
Geoff

[headus]

I've already answered Matt in email, but for everyone else who might stumble across this question ...

I do have some code that I've been using to transfer UVs in the other
direction (from low rez mesh up to higher) but its not currently in
UVLayout. What I was doing is reducing/decimating first, then UV'ing
the lo-rez mesh, then copying those back up to the original hi-rez mesh.

I'm not sure though if it'll work from high down to low. The problem
will be the UV seams ... my tool cuts seams into the target
mesh if it sees that a poly spans across two UV shells, and when going
from low to high, the new seams are relatively close to the old one. But I
can imagine when going from high to low, the new seams may be a larger
distance away from the original seams. That means that the boundaries of
the new UV shells may reach into the maps where there's no texture.

Anyway, the quick answer is "no feature exists currently", but I do have
something in the works that will probably make its way into the released
version someday.

Phil