It would be very helpful if there was an option that would automatically set the UV islands direction to one common geometry direction. Right now, the UV islands direction maps to the UV sub-surfaces direction, which in the case of polysurfaces is usually a direction that is irrelevant to the person trying to texture an object. I think that every serious texturing tool has an option to orient UV islands in a desired direction. It is certainly available in Rizom UV, but also in Substance Painter.
This problem is particularly acute in the case of geometry generated/modified by Grasshopper, for which it is impossible to constantly manually correct or set UV mapping.
The question is, on what basis can we assume one desired direction for the entire geometry? Solid operations can mess up the orientation of, for example, Gumball.
I would like to emphasize that messing around with box mapping, cylindrical and others will not work in this case because it distorts the textures. Rhino does a good job of creating a UV mesh from sub-surfaces, the only problem is their orientation.
@nathanletwory @Jussi_Aaltonen
Ideas:
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By specifying one sub-surface, whose UV directions will impose the UV islands orientation on other sub-surfaces. For example, the sub-surface Display Color can survive solid operations, so permanently assigning this information to one of the surfaces should also be possible.
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Via the world c-plane direction. For many objects this would be sufficient…
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Using OCS Mapping. I don’t think this is possible now, please correct me if so. OCS mapping directions should be able to impose directions on UV maps.
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Block Definition coordinate system, for geometry inside a block it should be possible to define the orientation of UV Maps so that they map to the block directions.
Here you can see the different directions of the sub-surfaces in 3D space and their orientation on the UV map.
Substance Painter option (not that it works seamless) to Align with the 3D mesh
This geometry does not have any manual mapping in Rhino, as you can see the brushed metal texture aligns with the directions of the UV surfaces. This is usually not desired by the user.
