yeah, it sort of relates to that discussion we had about "magnifying" the tesselation near extreme curvature changes... Are you planning to put in a control for max distance to surface, like Rhino's? I use that a lot to get nice results...

jonah

> Are you planning to put in a control for max distance to surface, like Rhino's?

I don't know... I've kind of been trying to not have too huge of a set of options but maybe I'll have to add this one in as well.

- Michael

Always very interesting to see some topics about meshing... ;-)

Can you please explain what UV nesting is ? It's not a familiar concept for me

Thx

Schbeurd

UV nesting would be a different way to handle the UV coordinates that are exported by MoI.

Right now it uses just a simple system where every separate surface in a solid gets texture coordinates that span from 0,0 to 1,1 - that's across the entire texture image.

So for example say you have a cube and you put a texture on it using the UV coordinates generated by MoI - each face of the cube would have an identical full image displayed on it. If you were to paint on a face to modify the texture map, you would see the same paint applied to all the other faces as well.

UV nesting would change this so that each different face of the cube would be situated in its own smaller piece of UV space. With each face having its own separate chunk of mapping space it means that each one is independent so for example if you were to paint on one face to modify the texture map, it would only affect that one face and the other faces would remain unchanged.

- Michael

Here is an example of UV nesting, exported from Rhino as OBJ into Modo. You can see that all 26 faces in the polysurface are sharing the UV space with no overlapping. this makes it much easier to deal with texture mapping. And yes, i know this is a heavily tesselated mesh but that wasn't the point!!! :)

jonah

Thanks,

It's perfectly clear now !
It's really a cool way to do the UV mapping for you ! ;-) Definitely something I'd like to see in MoI as soon as possible. So useful with texturing software that use projection painting, where you don't really need UV "continuity" (like Modo or ZBrush). You virtually don't need to edit your UV map by hand anymore with that option ! Maybe just scale or move some of the parts in the UV space...

Is there any way you can control it in Rhino (for example to force some parts to "stay together" ?)
Would such control be possible in MoI ?

Can't wait for it ! ;-)

> Would such control be possible in MoI ?

I don't know - it is pretty hard to imagine how to control that without a pretty elaborate UI...

Some programs can automatically calculate this kind of separation for you in their UV editors, for example I'm pretty sure someone has mentioned Blender can do it. But I'm not familiar enough with its UV editor to be able to give you the details.

- Michael

>> Some programs can automatically calculate this kind of separation for you in their UV editors, for example I'm pretty sure someone has mentioned Blender can do it. But I'm not familiar enough with its UV editor to be able to give you the details.

Yes, you can usually do that in UV editors, by selecting the parts you want to UV and where the seams will be. I was more thinking at some sort of "pre-process" during the creation of UV map with UV nesting. It's some sort of "lazy" solution... ;-)

mmm. lazy good. work bad... :)

I think you should already have a natural seam in the UV coordinates for all the polygons that make up each face in a solid. Like for instance when you have a cylinder, UV coordinates are not shared along the seam of the cylinder, only 3D points are shared there. I wouldn't think you should have to manually specify seams.

Anyway, it would definitely be more convenient to have this done automatically instead of needing to do an extra editing step.

That's kind of one of the additional nice things of using a NURBS modeler, since every NURBS surface has its own UV space you get a UV mapping for everything automatically.

- Michael

Hi Jonah, that file-overwrite-on-cancel bug you reported earlier in this thread is fixed in that latest patch update.

Thanks,
- Michael

very cool! thanks Michael...

jonah

i just noticed that Modo 301 will have a UV nesting function called "UV Pack". So that's good news for export Moi meshes...

jonah