headus 3D tools

[dustinbrown]

A few things I'm noticing when I use UV Layout.

1) When in Edit view, if I use c to select an edge loop, pressing shift+d doesn't seem to work. If offsets my shell, but it doesn't split the edge selection. Hitting enter seems to do a better job of splitting, even though it's supposed to be used for breaking off shells.

2) When in Edit view, if I use c to select an edge loop, even if it's a closed loop hitting Enter often will not separate the shell. I have to select one more edge along the loop, then if I hit enter again it breaks away fine.

3) Once you have all your shells in their final size and position, it often times largely paints the shells in the blue (compressed) hue, and I think this has to do with the size of each polygon in relation to some predefined input, probably a texture map. Is there a way to reset that input to your final UV layout so your UVs are green and you can still see any stretched or compressed areas after you've scaled your shells and positioned them?

[headus]

"... if I use c to select an edge loop, pressing shift+d doesn't seem to work. "

Shift-D is for un-dropping (i.e. it restores a detached shell back to its original location); you need to use just plain D. Enter is best though because you get a chance to check its detached properly before being dropped.

"... if I use c to select an edge loop, even if it's a closed loop hitting Enter often will not separate the shell."

Its very pedantic ... it may appear that the loop is totally closed, but even if there's a small gap (i.e. one unmarked edge) it wont detach.

"Once you have all your shells in their final size and position, it often times largely paints the shells in the blue (compressed) hue,"

Are you resizing the shells after they're flattened? Whenever you rescale a shell, that shifts its color because you're changing the one-to-one relationship of the polygonal size in UV to its size in the geometry.

Don't resize shells just to fit them in the 0-to-1 unit square. Its better to resize the unit square ... the Pack tool will do that for you, as does the "Auto Fit" toggle.

Phil

[dustinbrown]

[dustinbrown]

So in this case I should not scale up the face shell? I want the face to have it's own UV space and take up as much of that space as possible, then the rest of the body can all share a second UV space. I know there will be some disparity in the fidelity of my textures between the face and everything else, but that's kind of the point, I want more res in the face. It just makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong when I scale the face up and it turns blue.

[headus]

Yes, scaling the head shell up is perfectly OK, and you are correct, its what you need to do to get more texture detail in that area. The problem you'll come across though is that if you move the seams or make some other sort of change, and want to reflatten that shell, UVLayout will shrink it right back down again.

Watch the "UVLayout-Local-Scaling" movie under the Advanced section of the uvlayout videos. It'll show you how to handle mixed scale UVs in a way that gives you the best of both worlds ... allowing for extra detail in parts and still being able to flatten without resetting the shell sizes.

Phil

[dustinbrown]

Yeah that video is brilliant, thanks. I'll watch the rest of these videos before I ask any more questions that they may cover.