8.2 UV Feature I found

[richcz3]

Old news to others George was New news to me.
Sure enough with the Vertex Map Panel open, pressing the sketch color offers the ability to change the sketch color.
Thanks for that.

[E_Moelzer]

Geee, hehe wasnt that documented?
One of my personal favorites of the smaller things we added to make UV- editing better in LW8.2.
IMHO the Vmap- panel got a lot more useful in LW 8.2 and hopefully will be opened more often now.
Glad you like it :)
CU
Elmar

PS: make sure to try shift (or control)- clicking multiple UVmaps in the Vmap- panel. That way you can select, display and edit multiple UVmaps in the UVview (and set the color and subpatch- UV- interpolation for all of them at once ;) ).

[Ramon]

That is nice. Kudos on that Elmar!:thumbsup:

OT,...
Now all that we need is a great UV pelting ability akin to "Unfold 3D". http://www.polygonal-design.fr/e_unfold/index.htm
Lightwave is truly needing that big time. Just think of how much faster a very tedious and unenjoyable ( :banghead: )task of manually unwrapping would be.

[Karmacop]

Does anyone have links on pelting? I've searched but I can't find any papers with the math involved :(

[Stevemeister]

Does anyone have links on pelting? I've searched but I can't find any papers with the math involved :(

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/700942.html

As with all research articles, they don't do any hand holding, and most of the math is cyptic and better described in their references. For the reference articles in that article, it's really good to visit the local university library and download them for free (university libraries get subscriptions so provided you are a student there doing research...). They are really easy to find.

EDIT: Oops, printed some misinfo. Been a while since I read that article. Well good luck Karmacop. If you decide to write a plugin, let me recommend you first try making one for non-subpatched (say game models first).

[telamon]

I agree that this is useful and I use that on a daily basis.

There are so many things that we could add to the Vmap pannel (for instance a "bone button" which may help to assign skelegons to UVMaps).

[gromit]

if anyone can find a document that covers the math behind it, I can write an Lscript that does the UV pelting thing...

[E_Moelzer]

Hey!
Well the current changes were all made in the course of the Subpatch- UVfix. One lead to the other there...
More UV- enhancements will follow soon, I promise!
I cant tell how soon, of course, but please know that we are aware of all the requests in this regard and will make sure they will be adressed as soon as possible.

How do you guys like the way the UV- editing works now? I am always eager to get feedback!
CU
Elmar

[fez]

Elmar. Thank you for all the hard work! UV editing in Lightwave is really awesome now thanks to you and the other team members. The distortionless subds are amazing and, I know firsthand, offer more options to account for distortion than any other package.

As for feedback:

A few UV scripts that I often use do not seem compatible with the new UVs. Align U, Align V and others like them no longer seem to work...

The one thing you might consider adding is a sticky key for the Free Move mode. Actually, while I am at it, sticky keys across the board would be nice...

Thanks again.

[Ramon]

if anyone can find a document that covers the math behind it, I can write an Lscript that does the UV pelting thing...

ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? THAT WOULD BE AWESOME!:bounce: :drool: :drool: :drool:
Hey guys, I implore you please find Ozgur the math behind pelting (unfolding)! That would be HUGE!! I know Houdini and Unfold3d have got this together (I hear Houdini is the better of the two). Maya also has a new(ish) Mel script called Unfold or Unwrap that does this also. However I don't know where to find the info on it (the math involved).

If anyone knows where to find this info, let Gromit know please. I can't see anything that is more important for accuracy and speed for distortionless texturing than this. Think of all the time and hassle we would be spared from - at the very least, mitigated from.

[monovich]

Elmar, I'm definitely much happier with the way UV's work now. The pelting thing would be GREAT, but I'm patient. The subpatch mode was huge for me.

actually, I have a UV question. Is there a way to scale UVs with the numeric panel? When I try it, it scales the geometry in the normal viewports, but not the UV viewport.

thx!

-sf

[Karmacop]

How do you guys like the way the UV- editing works now? I am always eager to get feedback!
CU
Elmar

It's UV editing, so it's always going to suck. :p

The only thing that does help is this sort of automatic pelting stuff.

[Ramon]

HAHA:wip: That's funny. It's true that the time involved in manually laying out UV is effort and time that could be much better utilitized on either texturing or animating.
Though the the distortionless subds are great (kudos on that), they don't address the auto UV unfolding (pelting) and of course it wasn't meant to.. and that's why it's still "an issue".
However, Elmar, you metioned "More UV- enhancements will follow soon, I promise!"
That certainly sounds good! Can you enlighten us as to what's cooking?

[Grub]

Quote:
Originally Posted by E_Moelzer
How do you guys like the way the UV- editing works now? I am always eager to get feedback!
CU
Elmar



I've always thought UVing is straightforward in lightwave and the Subpatch improvement was a great enhancement, so I am pretty much a happy bunny.:)
Thanks for the info E_Moelzer, keep up the good work.

[gromit]

@monovich - use my script UV2MORPH to transfer the UV info to a MORPH vmap, then all the modifiers will work as you expect...

@ramon - thanks for your support :), I found some papers that covers the "pelting", I'm reading them now...

[E_Moelzer]

Hello!
Thanks for the kind words! I am glad you guys like what we did here. This was of course possible to due to the work of the entire dev- deam.
We are aware of the fact that Lscripts still have problems with the new Uvediting (it simply was not possible to do that in the time for that release). It is ONE of the reasons why we will get back to this as soon as we can.
Yes UVunwrapping and editing is always a tedious process (even with the new free move mode). We have been thinking about ways to make this better and we are not just going to copy things from other apps for this.
Please mind you all though that we are just humans too and cant do everything at once.

We are going through all the areas of LW that require work and are constantly refining and even rewriting parts of the underlying architecture.
The Subpatch- UV- fix is a good example for this. While looking like a small feature it was a pretty large architecture- change actually. The original architecture was never meant to allow any interpolation for Vmaps other than linear. The old solution completely ignored the type of polygon (e.g. regular polygon, subpatch, metaball, etc) the Vmap was part of.
This made it impossible for the Subpatches to have any influence on the interpolation of e.g. the UV- coordinates of vertices.
Of course we could have gone the easy road and just hardcode the UV- interpolation for subpatches, but since there may be additional polygon- types in the future, we decided to implement a solution that would allow the polygon- type to have direct control of the interpolation (which may be very different from LWs subpatches).
This required us to extract the interpolation from the original location in the sourcecode and move it over to the polygon- type. Of course we had to prepare hooks for future enhancements etc as well.
Hope that explanation makes somewhat sense.
Now this is just one example (that is on topic for this thread) of the many architecture- changes that are being worked on in the background. Very few of these changes made for visible features in the current releases, but they will allow for a whole lot of goodies in future versions of LW.
Being a long time LW- user myself I am really looking foreward to that :drool:
CU
Elmar

[E_Moelzer]

Yeah there is currently only the way over using Transform UVs to scale UVmaps nummerically.
I would love to see a nummeric setting for UVmaps in all of Modelers tools.
Dont hold your breath, please, but we will look into this together with a few other things...
CU
Elmar

[Ramon]

Yeah there is currently only the way over using Transform UVs to scale UVmaps nummerically.
I would love to see a nummeric setting for UVmaps in all of Modelers tools.
Dont hold your breath, please, but we will look into this together with a few other things...
CU
Elmar
Thanks for all the info and explanations Elmar. As I mentioned before, my kudos to you and the LW DEV team.:thumbsup:
What about the auto-UV unfolding? Is that something that is being worked on or seriously considered at this point?
Thanks

[Ramon]

@ramon - thanks for your support :), I found some papers that covers the "pelting", I'm reading them now...

ROCK ON MY MAN!!! Dude, I'm slobbering over the idea!

If NT doesn't realize the extreme usefulness of this feature, I'm glad users like you do! Once we have something solid like that in place, no one will want to be without it! I seriously wish you the best on that!
Here is some reference for you: http://sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au/ This is the link to Houdini (Apprentice). From all that I have heard, it has the best pelting (auto-unfolding of UV) in the business! If you like you can download it for free and check it out.
All the best to you and your efforts in this!!! Please keep me informed!
By the way, great work on your website!

[richcz3]

ROCK ON MY MAN!!! Dude, I'm slobbering over the idea!
Yes!, Way to go gromit
And thanks Elmar for the detailed explanations behind the dev process.

[G3D]

Thanks to all who replied. Great info.

[stompbox]

@ramon - thanks for your support :), I found some papers that covers the "pelting", I'm reading them now...

Words cannot express how excited I am by this possibility in LW. Yes we all do it by hand currently, but auto-pelt would have a dramatic effect on the time it takes me to get from modeling to the end of the texturing process.

[mav3rick]

elmar i have to tell that i really love new uv subp mode and you and NT team did killer job on this.
One thing i would like to see is PHANTOM selection in uv wiev to work like in editing mesh so i dont need to pick sorround points.

[gromit]

hi,

I red the article (after purchasing it from ACM for $10) "Seamless Texture Mapping of Subdivision Surfaces by Model Pelting and Texture Blending - Dan Piponi and George Borshukov", they don't use any mathematic iterations that they created, but instead they use Mayas Dynamics Engine to pelt the model, they wrote a MEL Script that setup the scene to pelt the model by simply connecting the texture boundry of the model to a surrounding disks vertices with springs, then they run the simulation, and finally they got the pelted model, thus they are solving the problem in 3D not in 2D... This technique is not suitable to write an LScript for modeler, it is way beyond to write an soft body solver for Modeler... But a similar technique can be used in Layout with ClothFX, one can try this, while I'm searching for another techniques that are present...

[telamon]

Here is a rather great participation from Elmar Moelzer.

I am very interested by the fact that NT anticipates further development in the polygon types for the new UV editing tool.

I just assume NT has not forgotten the future and unavoidable implementation of edges in LW :D

[E_Moelzer]

Hey Telamon!
How could we forget about that?
I should clear up some confusion maybe. Polytypes are related to e.g. different Subpatch- types, not so much to UVediting...
CU
Elmar

[Netvudu]

We are going through all the areas of LW that require work and are constantly refining and even rewriting parts of the underlying architecture.
The Subpatch- UV- fix is a good example for this. While looking like a small feature it was a pretty large architecture- change actually. The original architecture was never meant to allow any interpolation for Vmaps other than linear. The old solution completely ignored the type of polygon (e.g. regular polygon, subpatch, metaball, etc) the Vmap was part of.
This made it impossible for the Subpatches to have any influence on the interpolation of e.g. the UV- coordinates of vertices.
Of course we could have gone the easy road and just hardcode the UV- interpolation for subpatches, but since there may be additional polygon- types in the future, we decided to implement a solution that would allow the polygon- type to have direct control of the interpolation (which may be very different from LWs subpatches).
This required us to extract the interpolation from the original location in the sourcecode and move it over to the polygon- type. Of course we had to prepare hooks for future enhancements etc as well.
Hope that explanation makes somewhat sense.

And this Elmar, is what I call smart thinking, long-term preplanning, care for one´s work and reporting to us, simply amazing customer/co-fellow artists support. Thanks a lot. Everytime you post here you earn another medal for the dev team.

[telamon]

How could we forget about that?
about edges (NdA)


This is a great scoop :D (I am kidding, OK :D )

[E_Moelzer]

Dont worry buddy. We dont forget anything you guys ask us to implement into LW ;)
CU
Elmar

[Ramon]

Dont worry buddy. We dont forget anything you guys ask us to implement into LW ;)
CU
Elmar
AUTO UV Unfolding (Pelting):D

The edge support would be excellent though!:thumbsup:
Thanks for the info Elmar.

[Ramon]

Words cannot express how excited I am by this possibility in LW. Yes we all do it by hand currently, but auto-pelt would have a dramatic effect on the time it takes me to get from modeling to the end of the texturing process.

stompbox, I could not agree more. I'd much rather spend that time doing something I enjoy, like texturing, modeling or animating.

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