GSOC 2011 Onion branch - UV tools, midterm progress

This is a presentation of my progress so far with the new tools for blender.
I must apologize in advance for my horribly spoken English but I expect the problem will go away in future presentations.

Features:
-High resolution textures for 3D view
-Subsurf-aware unwrapping
-Smart stitch
-Calculate Seams from UV layout
-Export Weights as Images

Note to users: The weight export shown at the end is meant so you can load them as layers and use them as masking for the projection paint using gimp, photoshop, etc.

EDIT: High resolution refers to the bitrate of the image not, for instance support for images with higher dimensions than ram can handle. This requires some tiled-memory manager approach that is not part of this project.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• GSOC
• blender
• onion
• UV

[MoolahNasreddin]

Subsurf unwrapping - that's the feature which was wanted by many people! Thank you! :)

Do you plan to make some more "AI functions" for Smart Stitching (SS)? It will be really cool if it will be available to make SS possible to auto-detect the rotation of an island (like on the video - it's a square) so it will be rotated and snapped after confirming the stitching. It's like an "Auto-Tetris" for Blender :)

I hope!

[zechordlord]

@MoolahNasreddin thanks! For auto rotate and snapping, check latest onion, I put it in this week, to activate press s. Let me know how it works for you.

[Ghettoblume]

hey, please don't make the "çreate seams from islands" (or what it name was :D) . It would be an awesome tool for the workflow between blender and other programs. I often have the problem that I loose my UV seams after working in tandem between blender an ZBrush. The UVs are still intact though, so it would be really useful to just have to press a button to recreate the seams .

Thanks for your work , it looks really good!

[zechordlord]

@Ghettoblume 'don't make?' It's already done, let me know how it works for you :) Thanks!

[johweedee]

Ah, I see at the end that you're adding the ability to export weight maps. This is very useful for re-skinning a model with altered topology, as is done quite often in production. Hopefully we'll be able to import weight maps when the project is done? Of course this works only if the maps are exported from the uv layout, as kattkieru suggested. Keep up the good work!

[zechordlord]

@johweedee This is definitely on the plan, I'll start tomorrow. import, I hadn't thought about but your use case is extremely interesting so I may add this in too. Update: Found a way to choose directory so expect a better workflow from now on.

[MoolahNasreddin]

@zechordlord Hi!

Sorry for so long wait!

I checked two features (Subsurf Unwrap and Smart Stitch). Here are the test files.

pasteall.org/blend/7959

pasteall.org/blend/7960

You did a great job - "subsurf" unwrap makes a lot better UV Maps. I'm not sure it can be easily improved.

SmartStitch is good but I got a problem 1st time I tried it. Snap isn't doing what I expected to see. Can you check linked vertices of a selected island to be moved and rotated while the others will stay "calm"?

[zechordlord]

@kattkieru Yes, it would :) Nice idea, thanks!

[SuperGamer87]

Dude, you're the man!

[kattkieru]

Wouldn't the "save weight images" function be more useful if they were saved based on UV layout?