GSOC 2023: UV Editor Improvements Feedback

Hi! This topic is for any feedback/ suggestions regarding the GSOC 2023 project UV Editor Improvements.

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Hello! Thank you so much for working on this, I can’t wait to see how this develops.

Since the focus is incorporating mesh edit tools into the UV editor, adding the snapping options that can also apply to UV edit mode would be really great.

So things like snap edges/faces, Align Rotation to Target Option, Snap Active to Selected Option, etc, and maybe other options that would make sense to add.

Also maybe related to snapping, the UV editor kind of has a concept of active, but doesn’t really do anything with it, and seeing as how powerful it is in mesh editing, it could also be good to properly support active element in the UV editor.

Of course this is all if timing permits for you to add some of these, either way can’t wait to try the new improvements.

something that I really miss is a visual feedback to spot in realtime when uv islands are overlapping and when they are flipped.

There are some addons to workaround that, but in complex situations they are very slow and also not realtime.

thank you.

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Could uv sync selection be on by default or is that a bad idea. Just my suggestion

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It would be nice to add more control to the Align Rotation operator
For example, I want the operator to additionally flip the island. It’s faster than manually rotating the island afterwards.
Source Geometry:

Result in main:

My Idea:

It would also be nice to clean up the context menu. Such operators as Copy/Paste UV, Align Rotation would look great there

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Not sure if this falls within the scope of the project, but if you could improve snaps in the UV editor that would be neat. Maybe this could give you some ideas:

Other really nice improvements would be for to do what the Zen-UV addon does. You might want to look up the feature videos of the addon to get inspired. Things to consider are:

  1. Aligning UVs to world coordinates
  2. Scale islands to a target texel density
  3. Adding UV checker maps with a few clicks within the UV editor (so you won’t have to go to the shader editor and create a checker map first)
  4. Mark seams by angle, basically a wrapper that does select sharp edges > mark as seam

    You can see how useful this could be to get quick seams so you reduce manual seam marking.
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Blender needs texel density tools. Being able to sample texel density from UV islands, set the size of your UV map in relation to texel density, and finally applying texel density to selected objects is a must for keeping consistent texture quality. Used all the time for games where optimizing assets for performance are very important.

Right now this is only possible with add-ons. More alignment tools and stacking tools would be welcomed as well. Also, agreed with the above post about adding a checkerboard preview texture to find deformations in your textures, since that helps visualise texel density as well.

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I digress to say loudly. Blender’s UV editor still NEEDS a proper dedicated UI Toolbar.

Something dedicated to the top of the UV editor (horizontally with small icons) or a vertical side (blender usual) UI with a combination of small icons, buttons, etc.

I would like to know how feasible is it to port into Blender (Tex Tools, or UV toolkit) tool-sets as a set of “standard uv tools” for Blenders software. I know these add-ons require maintenance, but these are fundamental essential UV operations that are still missing in 2023’s Blender. There’s no logical argument as to why Blender should still abstain itself from these proper additions to its base set of tools.

Also, I would really love to see Blenders community do away with its obsession to advocate “Get it in the Add-on” approach to everything that aims at polishing Blender for the better.

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