Rhino WIP V8 - UV Editor Thoughts

[tay.othman (tay.0)]

Hello all and @BrianJ

I started Playing with the brand-new UV Editor, and I started struggling with some missing functionality that I’d like to see in the final release of V8, I think these features are so essential to any UV unwrapping / texturing workflow, and specifically most the points I’m speaking from an Architect’s perspective. Thus, some of my ideas may not apply to other disciplines.

Generally, I use UV unwrapping when there is a need for texture continuity around a corner. This is essential for brick, stone walls, and other corners like tiles… etc. Also, I use it with weathered textures when I need to include some substance painter in my workflow. my issues are below:

1- Any UV manipulation on an object will remove the object UVs from the UV editor, then I need to click on Show UVs for Selection and pick the project to make the UV object appears again in the UV editor.

2- Selecting one Edge in the UV editor, doesn’t show the edge selection in the main viewport. I was expecting the ability to see and track where the seams are happening, like in the image below:

Same for Faces

3- Selecting a UV edge doesn’t show the other UV edges (Siblings) that share the same mesh edge, like the image below, I was expecting the highlighted Edge to show a “Red or Blue” color highlight to reflect the positional relationship in the World Space.

4- Ability to “Pack” UV faces to be clustered within the UV space between (0,0) and (1,1) this is very helpful for Substance PBR or Texture painting workflow.

5- Adding of (2) Stitching tools similar to the Mesh Stitching in Rhino. You can move the UV cluster to stich the desired edges. or distort the UV cluster when 2 sibling edges are stitched together.

Before Stitching:

After Stitching (Method 1)

After Stitching (Method 2)

5- and finally, the Ability to “Relax UVs” this can be really helpful in smooth irregular geometries like SubD sculptures, this can be helpful avoiding UV stretching or unexpected seams.

I really hope these functionalities to be integrated into the UV workflow.

Thank you and Happy New Year!

Tay

[BrianJ (Brian James)]

Hi @tay.othman,

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions! I’ve filed items 2 and 4 as feature requests…
https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-72258
https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-72257

Regarding 1-

@tay.alrawi

Any UV manipulation on an object will remove the object UVs from the UV editor, then I need to click on Show UVs for Selection and pick the project to make the UV object appears again in the UV editor.

Can you provide more specific steps (and a file) for what you change that isn’t updating in the UVeditor automatically?

Regarding 3-

@tay.alrawi

Selecting a UV edge doesn’t show the other UV edges (Siblings) that share the same mesh edge

I think I understand but I don’t follow the goal with this one. Of course, number 2 from your list would need to be implemented first to do this one too but imagining that it all highlighted as you’d like, what would this help with? If you wanted to stitch those islands by their shared render/UV mesh edge, why not just unwrap without that edge as a seam?

Regarding 5-

@tay.alrawi

Adding of (2) Stitching tools similar to the Mesh Stitching in Rhino.

Stitch works now with UV meshes in the editor but it doesn’t always give a good result in terms of texture stretch as the face areas change nonuniformly in the islands. I think there are some other issues with this too and I’ll have to dig deeper to file them. I’m wondering though the same as with 3… why not Unwrap without selecting the edges that you want connected?

Regarding the last request-

Relaxing UVs is something you can do with the Smooth command but this can cause stretching in some cases. The best approach we have is to use the new ARAP method for unwrap which will keep the UV mesh ‘as rigid as possible’.

[tay.othman (tay.0)]

Thank You @BrianJ for going through my complaints. I’m really happy to see that Items 2 and 4 are being considered for feature requests.

I think Issue 1 was unique to a specific file that I couldn’t reproduce the issue, I’ll keep my eye open if the issue happens again.

Issue #3 what I call It “Sibling Edges” is to highlight to common edges ( or Faces) that are sharing the picked edge.

A big part of the texturing workflow is to paint the textures in photoshop/Affinity/Substance painter. sometimes I find my self in a need to have multiple objects sharing one single shader, so I can paint the continuity of the texture, that’s why engineering my UVs can provide me with the most efficient way to use a texture map without essentially wasting any useful pixel space. one example is this burnt building that I had to reconstruct:

and all of these objects are combined and UV’ed into a single 4k texture map:

You can see that this geometry is built with multiple objects thus I need to map them in a way that they share a common texture , so the output of the damaged building can be like this.

For these Reasons I think It is really essential to be able to
1- UV map multiple Objects, 2- See the positional relationship between edges. 3- ability to stitch, move or modify seams. 4- Ability to repack these textures into 0 to 1 space and 5- finally relax specific non-regular objects to make a seam-free UV configuration.

It is great to be able to use rhino mesh commands like stitch and smooth in the UV editor, but adding a UV editor toolbar can further help us in getting quicker access to these commands.

Thank you

Tay

[Eugen]

@tay.alrawi

1- UV map multiple Objects, 2- See the positional relationship between edges. 3- ability to stitch, move or modify seams. 4- Ability to repack these textures into 0 to 1 space and 5- finally relax specific non regular objects to make a seam-free UV configuration.

+1 for all of this!

Very nice design, btw.!

[tay.othman (tay.0)]

@BrianJ
I see the “Pack Texture Meshes” Now and It works nicely. Thank you for the hard work and the quick turnaround.

[BrianJ (Brian James)]

You’re welcome! Please give it a try with a workflow of yours that required this. I haven’t gotten to it myself yet with Substance Painter but plan to. I merely lobbied for the feature and confirmed it worked @Jussi_Aaltonen is the real hero!

[Jussi_Aaltonen]

I only hooked up something that @DavidEranen wrote some years ago, so I think he’s the hero here.