As much as I love every other part of Blender the UV Editor could use some attention as It’s lacking in a few essential things:
Colour Coded UVs - Useful for viewing flipped UVs. As it is, you can’t see whether or not if its flipped or not. Magic UV is a good workaround but you have to keep pressing the update button.
Make Stitched Edges stay stitched - I noticed that if you face select and move that face it cuts off. It makes me paranoid if it’s been stitched or not. Also, how do you tell if an edge is stitched or not? Thicker border edges like in Maya would help. I’m worried if I import a mesh into UE4 and generated Lightmap UVs it will end up with lots of tiny squares with gaps instead of a few large and unfolded UV islands with gaps.
Preview checker Texture - faster than manually importing a texture. Also, make it greyed out so that it doesn’t make it difficult to see the UVs.
Panels with buttons (Like in Edit Mode) - It definitely would speed up workflow it had buttons at the side instead of a Dropdown box. e.g Unwrap, Cut, Weld, Pack
UV Sync Selection by default - When I first started using the UV editor I was confused at which vert/edge/face corresponds to which in the 3d viewport. I later found out that I needed to sync the selection.
Texel Density - useful to make UVs have the same/similar amount of resolution in a face. RizomUV’s Texel Density is a great example.
Ideally, It would be great if it had the same functionality as RizomUV’s or Maya’s UV Editor (Mainly RizomUV) as those are easier and faster to UV map.
This improvement should make it that you can mostly stay in synced mode. Before you had to fight between synced and not-synced mode to do certain tasks, now with this highlight feature we can stay in synced mode for most of the work, which is where it feels best to me. I wouldn’t be surprised that when we get that they change the default mode to synced as well, but you never know.
oh but wwwhhhhyyyy? I don’t know what it looked like before but the dropdown box is slower, it needs icons for faster workflow. Maybe it needs like advanced Mode button for users who prefer it this way or something. I find the icon-based UV editor much easier to use than the dropdown box because all the tools are in front of you.
Wait theres Textools?! I used to use it in Max a while ago. However, I still do prefer a UV editor like Rizom UV over textools (too cluttered) and I also prefer using built-in tools instead cluttering blender with too many addons but hey its next best thing to work with for now. I hope they do improve on the UV editor and Thank you for mentioning this!
It created a hard debate in the community, the devs decide to remove the T-shelf where all tool were easily accesible because was no “good” and they preffered the menus. But some tools stay in the new sidebar that is similar to old t-shelf but at the right… it is a funny story
I’d like to see dome kind of orientation parameter for smart uv project uvmapping. So if you uvmap a house your wall islands end up in any which way. Some sideways, some upside down on the uv. This can be highly unwanted for any game assets that used tiled textures for example (some walls are sideways, some upside down) and only option is to manually uvmap everything.
For all uvmapping it would be useful if blender had some kind of “keep scale”. So if you uvmap objects to a texture space which already has other objects it would be great if you could add the new object uvmaps to it that follow the same scaling. For example 1 meter in 3d viewport is 128 pixels. I don’t have really good solution to this but I feel pixel/length ratio would be useful parameter for all uvmapping operations. uv scale per length ratio would be another. For example 1 meter or 3 feet per 0.2 uv length or 1 blender unit = 0.1 uv length. Even better if you could check this value for islands and uv edges in uv editor for already uvmapped objects and islands.
Also uv editor should add support to some of the other blender features. Like last selected vertice is the active vertice and could be usable as pivot.
Great suggestions. I switched from Modo to Blender recently and can safely say that Blender is better in every way except for uv editing. A few suggestions on how to make it better:
-‘Sync view’ and uv display is probably the biggest issue with the uv editor. I feel like the uv window and the 3d one should always be in sync (look at Modo as a good implementation of this workflow). If you have an object selected (or if you are in mesh mode with all components deselected) your uv window should never go blank.
-adding a ‘uv seam’ shouldn’t split vertices in your mesh (even if this is what happens under the hood). It makes it hard to edit a mesh that has already been uv’d. You can easily introduce holes into your model without knowing it.
-All tools should work in sync mode.
-UV Squares (addon) tools should be part of the base blender feature set, especially the To-Grid tools.
-Add a ‘select by mesh continuity’ toggle button to the uv UI. By default, selecting a vertex in the uv window should let you select only that uv vertex. If you turn on this toggle, then vertex selections should select all uv vertices which are welded in the actual 3d mesh. This way you can edit your uvs without accidentally moving corresponding vertices on a different part of the uv sheet.
The UV Editor in Blender could really use some TLC. Textools in Blender is pretty awesome and did most of the heavy lifting but I’ve pretty much gave up on UV mapping in Blender completely and went with RizomUV instead. Mainly because of the lack of visual feedback and the face selection being fairly confusing at times in blender. I often have to go back to fix an issue with UVs. I also wanted to amke a few more suggestions:
grey out/ dim textures in the UV editor. Its sometimes its hard to see the UVs when the textures. of course you could do it in the material it would be much faster to implement if there was a button that toggles it on and off.
Toggle Grid textures with a button. its bit slow switching between the grid and the normal textures in Blender. if there was a default grid to toggle between it would make things a lot faster.
