Ultimate Unwrap Question

[jud]

http://www.cebas.com/products/products.asp?UD=10-7888-33-788&PID=5

[EricChadwick]

I prefer max's own UVW Unwrap. Plenty of tools in there.

If you export from Ultimate as .3ds, you will get all tris. Perhaps if you export .OBJ it might retain polys, don't know. Ask the developer.

http://www.unwrap3d.com/support.html

[Optigon-cg]

Wow, Ghost painter looks like the way to go! Too bad I don't have that kind of $$ right now. Ultimate Unwrap seems to work great for laying out UVs and it's only $35 USD. I did contact the developer with the same question and he replied by saying that all polygons are really tris but the edges can be set to invisible etc, etc. Stuff we all pretty much know. He didn't answer my question properly.

I never had much luck using Max's UVW Unwrap. I'm using Max 4.2 and I know Unwrap's been greatly improved in version 5. The problem I've always had is that after a while I can only see verticies in the Edit UVWs window. I loose sight of my edges. The fist couple selected polys lay out fine, then mysteriously no more edges. Does anyone know if this is a bug in Max 4.2. I checked the Discreet forum and found no mention of this.

Thanks.

Jim

[EricChadwick]

Should be a script floating around for "removing unused UV verts" which should get rid of your problem.

When you detach faces from a model, the model retains the detached verts' UVs. These show up as stray verts in the Edit UVWs window. Might be what you're seeing.

Ah, here it is... Peter Watje's Remove Dead UVs plugin
http://www.max3dstuff.com/max4/removeUVs/help.html

[Optigon-cg]

Thanks for the info posm. I figured out why I was getting only verts. I sometimes would delete the UVs that are there by default. In other words, when I first apply the UVW Unwrap modifier and then click 'Edit" I'll see a top projection of the UV coordinates of my model (see attachment). This would get in the way so I would delete it sometimes instead of just moving it out of the way.:blush:

The only other inconvienience I can find using the UVW Unwrap modifier is that on complex models it can become difficult to remember what faces I've laid out vs. which one I haven't.

OH,... maybe I should assign different material ID's at the edit mesh level and just select them that way in the UVW Unwrap.

Would that work?

Jim

[Optigon-cg]

Nope. Just tried it. If I change a map channel I loose the previous one. So now I guess my question would be: What's a good method of breaking up the mesh in a logical way that would prevent me from accidentally re-selecting faces?

[EricChadwick]

Here's a couple decent tutorials.

Waylon Brinck covers lots of the tools.
http://waylon-art.com/uvw_tutorial/uvwtut_01.html

Logan Foster covers how to use material IDs + more.
http://members.shaw.ca/loganfoster/download/index.html

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