UV Unwrap Improvements for 2.81 and beyond?

Archive User Feedback
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I’m sure many of you are aware of the UV Tools in Blender, or rather lack of.
There are some great Add-ons that help alot in this area, and are basically a necessity IMO to be able to do any sort of Professional work.

However, I do wonder/hope that Devs will be able to address the issue themselves, and add some more industry standard tools/workflows in the UV Editor/Mode, to catch up to programs like 3DS Max or Maya.

UVPackMaster is a very good Add-On, that I feel like is 110% worth the money, if anyone hasn’t purchased it yet. It’s one of the best UV Packing Addons I’ve ever used/seen. Especially for the price, and performance! It’s already saved me days of work in the first few assets I’ve done.

TexTools is of course one of the most widely known or used UV Addons. But it would be great to get those features built into Blender itself / not as an Add-On. Also now that Multi-Object Support is there in 2.8, having all UV Tools work with Multi Objects would be awesome as well.

Currently TexTools has issues with Multi-Object Unwraps, and will bug out/not work when trying to do things like Align UV shell to an Edge, or perform other commands, if you are in UV Sync Mode/multi object mode.
I think UV Sync mode should just be on by Default or always have that 1:1 between 2D View and 3D?

Also there is currently no good way to see UV Seams in the 2D View, which is very confusing, coming from Max or Maya. At least that I know of… I’ve also seen issues where Importing an FBX from Max and going into the UV Mode, overlapped UVs get stitched on the edges and you have no idea that it’s happened unless you move each vert or really look into it.

Basically I’ve had to install at least 3-5 UV Addons/Scripts to get something useable, and be able to work somewhat like what I’m used to in 3DS Max.

The one I’m using now are:

  • Magic UV
  • UV Drag Island
  • UV Toolkit
  • UVPackMaster 2
  • TexTools

But even with all those Add-Ons, it’s still lacking tools/features I’d have in Max, and has bugs that I mentioned as well. I mainly stick to doing my initial Unwrap in Max yet, then mainly doing packing in Blender, since it’s so good with that Add-on. But Ideally I could do everything in Blender and feel comfortable/not worry about losing alot of time, or struggling to do some simple things as I would otherwise.

13 Likes
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Absolutely agree on the combination between UVLayout (currently not ported to Blender 2.8 by the original developer so the script has a few hickups and problems as mentioned) and UVPackMaster.
I also do my unwrapping in Modo and then transfer over to Blender mostly for UVlayouting and final export.

I agree on all the points you’ve made already and like to add a few ones of my own:

  1. Color code inverted normals/faces in the UV layout:
    An optional toggle to show faces that are inverted (for example by mirroring over a portion of the model) in the UV Layout. These can cause problems with text decals and normal maps if they pass unnoticed.
  2. relax algorithms that can be used on selections:
    At one point SLIM was already introduced as a new form for UV relaxing besides ABF+, which is still the current algorithm, I think.
    What I found to be a very effective form of working fast and iterative is being able to relax selected polygons in the UV editor with a different algorithm. Say, you have a mechanical and an organic piece of mesh in one layout. The unwrap algorithm isn’t suited for both equally good so after everything is unwrapped you could select all the islands that have too much stretching and apply another relax method. Which brings me to …
  3. … more reliable streching display. It would be cool to see strecthing in relation to the other polygons of the mesh. The other problems of the current stretch display, I think, Aurel Gruber also talked in his Blender Panel from 2016.
  4. viewing inactive UV sets while not being in edit mode also has a lot of benefits. This could be achieved by having a selection for displaying all UV sets from either a selected collection or via the UV name.
  5. Show island overlaps color coded (probably red or user adjustable)
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I have posted this many times.
No one cares about this feature and almost everyone thinks it exists in Blender, which is not the case.
This features is called Perserve Uvs.
With this you can move, rotate, scale vertices and UVs at the same time. Something similar is in Magic UV addon (Texture Lock). But it is buggy to the point of unusability.
More in this video.


Please. Post it everywhere.
10 Likes
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Agree with pretty much everything above. In XSI you could choose to highlight overlaps, or non-overlaps. Would also like to see a feature from XSI that would color corresponding edges of “loose” polygons when they are selected - for those times you might have stray polygons and not know exactly where they stitch back into a UV island - or their orientation:

UV%20Color%20Edges
UV Color Edges.JPG687×954 42.7 KB

This might be more appropriate for Right-Click Select…

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UV editing could for sure do with some love… This thread has a lot of good suggestions also:

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Can we keep everything in 1 discussion?

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There is one feature from Maya 2018 I am very interested in.

it’s called “UV shell”, not sure how other maya User called it. It’s very useful and can make your job easier in unwrapping. You would be finished faster than doing unwrapping object manually. :thinking:

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Shape keys for UVs would be pretty cool, and an semi automatic UV solution similar to UV master in Zbrush. Dreaming big here :slight_smile: .

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I haven’t seen any talks from anyone about UV improvements yet, which is too bad. There are many UV addons I use, which helps, but still no proper UV Relax tool, similar to most other DCCs.

Maybe sometime soon, someone will start to look into this…

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Is there a list of 2.82 / 2.83 compatible UV addons? I’ve decided to drop Textools as some of the tools are just too buggy … I believe it’s also no longer being developed so these bugs will never get fixed.

+1 for more UV tools included in the official Blender install. It does seem to be sorely lacking.

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I have quite a few I use, to make it actually more useable… These are the main ones though, besides TexTools.

UvPackMasterPro (MUST BUY, IMO, is awesome!) https://gumroad.com/l/uvpackmaster2
UVToolKit - Very handy set of tools https://gumroad.com/alexbel#NbMya
UVDrag Island - https://gumroad.com/l/xLqXX

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Hey thanks for those. I already use UVPackMasterPro and it is indeed awesome, and I was just looking at UVToolKit when you replied. Thanks for the links. :slight_smile:

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Coming from 3ds max, I also think the tools for unwrapping in blender is incomplete.

Another suggestion is creating seams based on the UV islands/ shell. Currently, selecting edges and marking seams is the only way to create seams.
So for example , I would select 2 faces on a cube , click unwrap. Blender should automatically create seams based on the UV island I just unwrapped.
Another suggestion would be having different colors on the model based on the UV islands , to see more visually all the separated UV islands on the model.

Right now I still fully cant commit myself to using Blender because of the default UV tools.
I hope the devs implement the suggestions here on this thread.

2 Likes
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“Seams from UV Islands” exist in blender already. Automatically create seams it’s individual preference.
Some one (like me) no need it to be automatically.
But you can create simple script which run “Unwrap+Seams From Islands” and bind it on any key.