I'm not really sure the technique behind, but beeing able to unwarp nurbs uv's in MoI would be so great.
Ngones output are really nice, and help uv's job in soft like modo or uvlayout a lot, it's much better than having thousands or micro triangle to deal with ...
but, I also often have trouble to unwarp some strange/complex ngon topology from MoI, looks like unwarping algo don't like those extreme ngones that much.

Without saying that every uv's job is of course lost if you decide to re-export a model (or some part of it) becouse you need
a better mesh resolution ... it will enhanced the workflow so much.

Hi PaQ - I don't really expect to have an actual full unwrap mechanism built into MoI, it's a pretty complex area that I don't have much specific experience in.

But what I do expect to be able to do is to have a somewhat better organization of the implicit UVs that come from NURBS surfaces.

Right now when you export from MoI, there are UV coordinates exported, but the UVs for each individual surface span the whole texture rectangle.

What I expect that I can do would be to separate each surface UVs into different islands instead of having them overlapping over the whole texture rectangle. That's going to involve just scaling and placement of the current implicitly generated UVs though, which is not exactly the same as an actual "unwrap" type calculation.

- Michael

Hello

\\ Hi PaQ - I don't really expect to have an actual full unwrap mechanism built into MoI, it's a pretty complex area that I don't have much specific experience in.

Ho I can imagine, as there are dedicated tools for this since years ... so yes it's probably a full time job.

\\ What I expect that I can do would be to separate each surface UVs into different islands instead of having them overlapping over the whole texture rectangle. That's going to involve just scaling and placement of the current implicitly generated UVs though, which is not exactly the same as an actual "unwrap" type calculation.

I get it, that would be great allready. That's something packing from Modo/Uvlayout are supposed to do (pack + stetch ) ... but it doesn't work that great. Modo often just freeze when models are a little bit complex, and uvlayout stetching is not correct/accurate enough (still a lot of distortion on one axis).

Hi PaQ, so another thing that I'd need to decide about for UV packing is which things to target to pack together within the same texture rectangle.

The way I was thinking would be to do it at a solid level, like shrinking down the UVs for each surface within a solid so that each surface occupied its own little uv island of the full texture rectangle.

But I guess there are other possible ways to do it like pack everything within the same style to be within one texture rectangle.

Is there one particular UV grouping method that would stand out as being the best thing to target?

- Michael

Well again Michael, I look forward to trying out any ideas you may have on the UVs and give feedback on how it works out with my stuff!

JBShorty
"@ Will - use a curve grid to split the objects, then join together before exporting at very low resolution..."

I'm not sure what you mean by curve grid? Do you mean just split my objects at the places where the topo could be better to get a better match between the surfaces?


-Will

Hi Michael,

Sorry for the little delay, I had to think about it, but I would say your solid based idea probably fit the best 'my' workflow.
Probably because I don't use style at an exteme condition, I often make all my material attribution in an other software.

As far as every uv islands have the same ratio (so no stretching/scale difference between every uv's island).

Still have to think about it a little bit too :)

Hi PaQ,

> As far as every uv islands have the same ratio (so no
> stretching/scale difference between every uv's island).

Stretching won't really be possible to totally eliminate if the surfaces themselves compress or squish.

But in relation to one another the way I was thinking would be to do it by surface area of the 3D polygons.

So for instance the corner patch in a filleted box would get a smaller UV area than a larger sized piece.

- Michael

>> But in relation to one another the way I was thinking would be to do it by surface area of the 3D polygons.

So for instance the corner patch in a filleted box would get a smaller UV area than a larger sized piece.

Yes what's I have in mind in fact, distortion can be fixed with a uv unwarp package.

It's an old workaround used in Rhino to force tesselation where the mesher doesn't find the solution on it's own. So yes, I mean you can try splitting the object then rejoing to make "user-defined" polygonal boundaries...

Hi there

T-Splines can sometimes produce the kind of UV continuity you are looking for, but then again that requires Rhino + T-Splines.
T-Splines currently does not use trimmed surfaces, but it places vertex points points into the same plane to give a smooth result.
Think you may find this interesting.

-Fredrik