headus 3D tools

[ivan.stukov]

there are cases where you do not care about streching or the like since the texture map / lighting is going to be generated by your software (baked)

so all you want is the entire map to be spread equally to cover max space so that everthyng gets as much "tan" as possible

something like the smooth key but that tends to make parts that stick out a lot in 3d really small since the smooth key only looks at the 2d world so those pasrts have to be then manually scaled up = pain

maybe a mixture between smooth and F or a local smooth that takes 3d into account

or maybe an addon function for the local scale like in your ear tutorial, when you scale all down its gets evened out nicely but you then will have difficulty to scale it up since some point inevitably will overlap others

[headus]

Can you post or email a pic of the sort of layout you're wanting to spread? I had an idea where something like a voronoi diagram is calculated for the already flattened shells, and then each shell is stretched out to its voronoi cell boundary, but whether it could work or not depends on the starting layout.

Phil

[ivan.stukov]

Here is a simple example:
As seen in the last picture the goal is to get the distortion to propagate into infinity and yet trying to give each polygon maximum surface coverage for the baking preferably roughly retaining its original volume.

in other words:
streching = dont care
volume of each poly = as close as possible as in the mesh


so yeah... voronoi seems like a great idea
or maybe pin the tip and somehow make it so that the rest doesnt go bonkers when i try to local flatten

my deadline is till tommorow, think you can pop out quick update till then? :)
(just kidding)

[headus]

Yeah, the smooth function totally ignores the 3D info ... that's a feature actually, because sometimes you just want the UVs to be evened out regardless of the geometry.

Have a look at the sequence of images below. I created a similar test grid to yours, then dropped and flattened it and the spiky bit is too spiky and sort of collapses off to one side. But if you switch to the "Old" flattening method (its the "O" toggle under the Edit panel), then reflatten, switch back to the "New" method (i.e. the "N" toggle), then reflatten again and you get something sensible. I'm not sure why this works, and it could be a bug, but the result is as good as you're going to get I think with that sort of spiky geometry.

Phil

[ivan.stukov]

yes, that does come quite close, thanks!

for anybody else who is reading:
you need to pin the stuff you dont want to move
and then do what phil said in the previous post with local flatten (B key).