headus 3D tools

[Armus]

Ok. Ive used UVlayout a couple times now and feel Ive got the basics down pretty well. My problem is cleaning dense areas that are distorted. Ive pulled UVs so none are overlapping but Im still left with a lot of distortion. I cant use the B key because it just wants to put things back to overlapping and distorted. The only other tool for cleaning up areas seems to be "4" and "5". But these keys never seem to do anything useful. A lot of times they twist the UVs up into a mess. The user manual says they replaced a relax tool.

It seems to me a relax would be a lot more useful. Relax usually seems to be a process that averages spacing which seems like it would fix my problems.

Going in a moving tons of UVs by hand just is not how things should be done but Im finding I have to do that a lot in UVlayout. Is there some technique to using 4 and 5 I dont know about?

[headus]

The reason why the polys are bunching up like that is because you are trying to squash too much geometry into too small a space.

If you want a smoothing/averaging tool, use the '6' key. That will remove the kinking, but it cant magically get rid of the stretching of the texture in those areas because of the shape of the geometry.

Cutting more seams would help too, but of course you may not want to do that in this case. I cant really tell just from that one image, but maybe there's a crease in the geometry where those edge loop are bunched up (see green line in image below). You could cut that center section out and reflatten the two shells to reduce the distortion, and any texture seam will be hidden in that crease.

Phil