 All right. Here we go. Oh, that's very loud. Okay. Amazing Everybody Welcome to the talk about UVs My name is Jonathan Lampell. I work for CG cookie and I'm here representing them as well as orange turbine on the orange turbine side of things we help studios and businesses start to use wonder and that involves often Jason making a bunch of pipeline tools and so we We took the add-ons that we had been working on over on CG cookie and moved them over to that side of the business because it made a lot more sense And so I've been working on a few add-ons recently one of them has to do with UVs And so today I want to talk about the things that I've learned about UVs while I've been making that And how to speed up the workflow So I will be talking about the plugin a little bit But mostly I want to talk about the ideas behind it And so hopefully some of those might even be able to be implemented into blender um But blender does UVs a little bit differently than other software And so I want to talk about the specific workflow that blender has and how to use it as quickly as possible um Who here loves UVs? Okay, like a couple hands shockingly shockingly more than I thought not bad um Most people do not and so I feel like anything that makes the process a little bit easier is definitely worthwhile um Also, it's almost halloween halloween weekend. Uh, so I figured a very spooky topic would be an order um I was going to wear a halloween costume Put it in my suitcase, but then uh, I realized it was missing and uh, I think I forgot to pack it so eh all right So the reason I'm talking about UVs is because um, I worked on a project a little while ago that involved um Some hard surface game assets packed a bunch of them together, but this was back in blender um Let's see three points no 2.6 and So I ended up doing all of these by hand, which um Was very painful and so since then I kind of had a notebook of like all the things that I wish UVs might be able to do and then just slowly add into those over the years And then eventually was able to finally do something about it earlier this year Um, but it's been it's been years of just collecting little things that I wish um, I could tweak The first thing that made this so much easier than having to do all of this Back in 2.6 is multi-object editing not a UV specific feature, but this actually Makes it possible to do a whole lot of things. Um specifically packing multiple objects together Which is something that you couldn't really do before there was an add-on for it But it was very it was a weird workflow and sometimes broke Um, so being able to just select multiple objects go into edit mode Uh, it makes things Much easier and it's crucial for the material based texture set based workflow, which we'll talk about Also improved packing in 3.6 by developer chris blackburn Is just phenomenal. It's so much better. Um It's very very good. It's not quite as good as some of the alternative packers out there UV pack master is still king of all of them But it's very very good and you can get a good pack just by default in blender now So these two things made it so much easier and instead of spending days on UVs like I was doing before I think I spent a total of like three days unwrapping and packing that thing Previously now you can do that much more quickly But first why do we even need UVs in The year of our lord 2023 like it seems like a very old technology Why do we still need to to use these things? Um, but it's incredibly simple and that's exactly why it works So first of all procedural textures. This is an example from my co-worker kent tremel This is a fully procedural wood shader. So it's like you can make some pretty cool things with procedurals But a long list of instructions for the computer is always going to be slower to compute than a pixel telling it Exactly what color it should be like it's just always going to be very resource intensive It can't really do that in a lot of real-time applications Also a lot of uh procedural textures still need UVs for their coordinates and things like that So you can't really get away from UVs even when working with procedurals a lot of the time Sometimes you can but not always Also p-tex is another alternative people always ask about like oh, what about p-tex? And a picture of bolt because that was the first movie that disney used it mostly on quite a while ago now And p-tex down stands for per face texturing, which means that every single Face of your object has its own texture. So they might not be big textures. They might be very small even one pixel But every single face has its own texture and its own, you know little unwrap And so you can paint like that. So in that case it abstracts away the UVs, but they're still there But the reason it's not used as much for a lot of things besides, you know Heavy film production is because again, it's very resource intensive It's you can imagine having a image for every single face of your object Is pretty heavy So we were actually going to get this In blender potentially back in 2015 developer I believe Nicholas Bishop was working on implementing it, but there wasn't enough Need from it from the community and also there was a couple roadblocks and so it never got finished but The industry kind of moved on from that a little bit and it's More about like udems and stuff now. So it's not as relevant as it was Decals other great option It works you can you can get away with not using UVs for some objects But it's really limited to very simple like your your larger areas have to be very simple And like very low amount of procedural stuff In order for that to work you can't you can't decal your way around a rounded brick wall or something like that You have to use UVs at some point For most objects Okay, so UVs aren't going away. What about AI? Can we just have AI do it for us? Which would be extremely nice That's something that if anybody has experience with I'd love to talk to you about but The number one reason that we don't have it yet is because it's a little more niche than what people are researching right now But also because you just need a lot of high quality models and high quality examples of UV unwraps in order for this to actually be useful And that's something that's very difficult to get like we at orange turbine Like we're not just just going to scrape a bunch of games or you know models off of sketchbab in order to make this work Like that's not a good idea So there's just not that many Ways to get all of that data that's actually needed. So eventually it'll get there but Likely not for a bit, but even if it does right the automatic one-click type of things probably need to be fixed a little bit After the fact so you might have to tweak it and it might only be you know Five to ten minutes of tweaking versus an hour or so, but even so you want a robust set of tools to do that easily Um when you have to So even so you editing tools not going away as far as I know we'll find out um in the soccer we'll Look at blender's UV tools how to use them as effectively as possible We'll talk about the custom workflow that I was working on As well as possible improvements either to the tool itself or to blunder so first The easiest way to get UVs is just through projection. So this is like the simplest method All you're doing is you're taking An angle or multiple angles and just flattening the model Looking at it from that direction And just projecting it outwards. So blunder has a couple types of projection cube cylinder sphere protecting from the view and smart UV projection Which isn't like super smart, but it just bases it on the angle And you end up getting a decent unwrap with minimal stretching Often looks quite good, but it's you know, very messy in the seams Can cause some problems. So it's mostly for really dense objects that you don't really care exactly what the UVs look like But in general blender relies much on much less on projection than other applications do and so I don't end up using them all that often So making seams, I'm sure if you've used UVs, you're very familiar. Just go into edit mode here Select some seams Let's go to box select. You select some seams Some edges here right click mark seam pretty quick not too bad But there's an even faster way to do it. So that's just based on the edge menu also control E You can pick the shortest path, which is the fastest way to do it in vanilla blender You just select an edge hold down control select another edge and it'll tag everything in between If you go down to pick shortest path set that to tag seam. You can very quickly just boom, boom, boom, you're done So that's pretty nice works quite well You can't do that on a single edge, but as long as you have multiple edges all connected that you need to unwrap then there you go You can also select by attribute. So half of the battle is selecting the right edges to mark as seams in the first place And you can select things based on a variety of different attributes in the select menu I'm often going to select similar And using select by similar sharpness or select by beveled edges or whatever and that way I can just select a Sharp sharp edge and then place the seam there for everything But you can also, you know, select sharp edges like so find an angle and mark seams that way. So That's definitely helpful Um, and we'll talk about that a little bit later From islands you can mark seams from your existing uv islands So for example, if you have a default unwrap or let's say you used one of the projection methods If you go and unwrap your model again, since you don't have seams all of that information will be lost and you'll have to start over So what you generally want to do is after you've done something like that Or you have a primitive that you want to keep the uvs for You just go to the uv editor select everything uv and Seams from islands And there you go So that's also very helpful Yeah All right, so speeding up seams So they're not very slow. We saw those tools very quick Um, however, if you're making hundreds of cuts thousands of cuts if you're spending all day working on uvs going Three clicks per operation. It is not super ideal Um, so what we did and this is myself. Um, but the the bulk of this was JF Matthew who we hired to work on this is we built a tool for placing seams just as an active tool So once you install the add-on you just go to cut uv in the edit mode toolbar And all you do is just click and make a seam so very easy. Um, but Double click mark the loop Just like so You can draw seams Like that In case you have like an arbitrary path that you need to follow There's the pick shortest path by holding control all of that But the most the thing that I'm most excited about here is that when you double click To mark seam it stops at the other seams So this seems like a very minor feature and it's in a lot of other uv tools If you're used to working in rhizome or whatever But the reason this is helpful even though it might seem small at first is that let's say you have a character You want to split it into sections? You can split the neck the arms the legs Um the torso And then if you want to split the sides you just double click like you're just double clicking all these things You're done very quickly. Whereas if you're just selecting by loop, you know That's going to run all the way down the legs up the arms around the head Cross the fingers all of that. So it's just a very easy way to split things up into sections And if you hold like shift and double click then it just goes all the way through if you want to but again It's very very quick But just marking by seam and then stopping at the seam very important What else uh seam layers So this is something that I have wanted for a while and that's where In blunder you have your seams. You have one set of seams, but you can also have multiple uv maps Um and the seams don't really correspond to the uv maps at all. They're not associated whatsoever. So if you have multiple Uh unwraps then you work on one You have your seams But then in order to work on a different unwrap that you want to maybe place a decal or something you have to Uh get rid of all your current seams make your new ones and then wrap that way and if you go back to the first one You're like you just have to remake your seams or go seams from islands again So that takes a while. Uh, so what we did um specifically jf did this one Which is incredibly helpful is we associated seams with uv maps. So All we need to do is just mark some seams Just like so. Um, and if you switch your uv maps This seems are saved on the map. Um, so that just makes a lot of sense And uh is is much faster to work with. Um, especially Not every project needs multiple uv's on a on an object, but a lot of Game assets that I've worked on have definitely needed that. So that's been helpful uv flow It's currently in beta. So it's not actually fully out yet But you can find it online or um, I'll show you a link at the end and then you can just get it I'll I'll give it to you for free to try out um Okay, so this is how the tool works for anybody who's interested in the technical details Most of what I'm going to talk about is stuff that you can do at home Like if you know a little bit of python, you can replicate A lot of the functions of the add-on however for the active tool in the toolbar that is not quite the case uh because Use the active tool api not the most documented area of blender, but it's it works pretty well However, it doesn't have a on start or on exit function that you can use So what we had to do in order to make this work As you can see we have pre-selection highlighting and you know a bunch of Context sensitive stuff in order to make this work So what we had to do is run this run a state machine inside of a timer inside of the tool And that creates a whole lot of uh extra little hurdles that we had to work around. Um, so it's Yeah, I wouldn't say it's um ideal But it's it's the only way that it can really work. And so it was worth the extra effort, but it did take Um, I would say a good a good few months. Um in order to actually figure out how to make this work reliably Um, let's see. It's using raycasting or using pre-selection highlighting And it saves and loads attributes. So when you mark a seam or do anything related to uvs It saves all that information as attributes on the mesh And that's how we're able to do the uv layers and a couple other functions that you'll see later So it's all thanks to the generic custom attributes One weird thing about that is that you can only set and load them in object mode So we're working in edit mode, but we have to switch over to object mode in the script and then switch back to edit mode In order to make that work, but it it does do the trick All right, can it be added to blender? This is something that I definitely want to think about as if you have a tool That's very useful. Why not just implement it? Um, first we're breaking all sorts of design uh design conventions of blender in order to make this work because we're doing several things we're doing them at once and So As a whole no, but the idea of having an active tool that sets attributes that makes a lot of sense So maybe that could be added or some of the other like specific functions, which we'll talk about later Hopefully could inspire features or things. Maybe that we could add ourselves if if we could Um, so some specific parts might be able to be added But not everything as a whole it actually works better as an add-on because Again, we're we're breaking the rules in order to make it easier for the user and in this specific case That works great. So that's the beauty of add-ons. You can break the rules. It's definitely punk rock that way. It's nice uh unwrapping So unwrapping has several options in blender versus angle base versus conformal Actually had to work pretty hard to find an example where conformal was better You're pretty much always going to want angle based But if you have a very flat area that's rounded on the outsides, then angle base doesn't work quite as well But for the majority of cases Angle based is almost always better and gives a more uniform unwrapped and conformal Which can lead to a lot of stretching. So the manual says conformal is better for simple objects But that's not quite accurate I would stick with angle based most of the time Fill holes is another option It just pretends that there are polygons where there are holes and so you get a more accurate More accurate unwrap around any holes correct aspect Let's see. I don't have an example of this one, but it's where you have a non-square texture It'll stretch the UVs to match that. You can turn that off if you want to but it's very helpful for um making sure that it if you have like perfect squares in the texture that it looks like perfect squares on your model And not be stretched use sub div is also very helpful I don't use it all the time because it is a little bit slow because I have to take all the extra Polygons from the subdivision surface modifier into account as it's unwrapping But in some cases you'll get some extreme stretching Here's the case where I just took a plane and subdivided it And what happens is as you subdivide it, of course that distorts the UVs and so you can correct for that when unwrapping Um issue with that is then if you switch sub div levels, right? It's going to change um Your the result of your UV so you want to do that at the sub div level that you're rendering at Which sometimes is a little bit of a hassle, but it does it does work quite well Okay, live unwrap. So this is one way of unwrapping very quickly and all it does is that anytime you place a seam it unwraps the entire object So if we have an object here, you have to turn it on in two places you go to options in the 3d viewport live unwrap UV editor UV Live unwrap and then anytime you place a seam I'll just Do that go to edge select Let's see mark seam It'll should unwrap everything for you. Is that on for both? Let's see Oh Has to uh, make a change. Let's see mark seam. There we go. Um And mark seam. All right, so you can see it just updates the UVs as you go So this is extremely fast. It's very helpful But there is one issue with it, which I want to talk about Uh, I think next let's see Okay, so the way we're doing it is slightly different. We're using blunders regular unwrap But we're just using a generic attributes as the seams and there's no reason that you can't use other attributes as seams as well So in the tool as you're unwrapping Um, not only can you have the you know different UV layers You can also use any other attribute As a seam so you can use a specific angle a bevel a crease or a sharp or a freestyle mark Whatever you want, um, potentially custom attributes like it doesn't like anything could be a seam It doesn't necessarily have to mark these as seams. They just act as seams So if you have a hard surface object for example, um, and you're going to bake the normals It's really important that anything that's marked as sharp has to be a seam like that's just if you want a good rounded normal map um Otherwise you're going to get glitches if that's not, you know on the edge of your island because you need a little bit of Uh overshoot of the texture there Um, so to avoid glitches in cases like that, you know every every sharp edge has to be a seam Um, and so here you can just turn that on and you're good to go So you can unwrap an entire object without using seams at all in some cases Um apply scale is something that I've also wanted for a bit and that's where you know in blender if you scale your object Something ridiculous and you go into edit mode and you and unwrap It's going to be very stretched. Actually, let me do seams from islands first You and unwrap all right. It's very stretched But if you use apply scale here Unwrap, uh, it'll Figure it out and try to make it as square as possible So the way we're doing that is incredibly simple. All we're doing is we're just stretching the object in the opposite direction Unwrapping and then undoing that stretching so very basic But it does work and that way you don't actually have to worry about your scale as you're working Auto unwrap so this is Exactly like bundles live unwrap, but with one key difference Let me go ahead and make sure that's turned off Uh, let's see live unwrap off Like so, uh, it only affects the area That the seam is on so on either side of the seam It'll unwrap those two parts and not unwrap the rest of the object So if we have this on just a little like live button, um, and I mark a seam Like so you can see that the the face of the monkey jumped a little bit But the ears in the other areas did not If I place the seam here, you know, that area will be unwrapped but not the rest The reason this is really important is because if you have live unwrapped turned on all of the time, you know, it's very quick It's very fast to work with but let's say you do some manual work on your UVs. You Straighten them out. You do some relaxing. You Don't do whatever work you need. You put them in exactly the right place If you mark a seam anywhere on the rest of your object All that work is just reset. It's gone. Um, so I've definitely spent time Redoing things because I didn't realize that that was happening on the other side of my object didn't think about it and just had to redo it So it's a very simple change. It's literally just one one difference But that will definitely save some work. So Let's see Some tips for unwrapping subdivision surfaces. So we talked about the use sub div. Of course, there is that Which can help but if you have let's say something like a cylinder You add a subdivision surface you're going to get some stretching So the way that you fix that and the reason it's happening Is actually because there's a big difference in the scale of the face on one side versus a the scale of the face on the other side So up here, you know, we have these very small Small faces and here we have some very big ones and the difference between the two is causing that stretching So in general if you're using sub div what you need to do is add Some seams like that Or add some like holding edges In order to fix that and that'll that'll fix it The problem is with blender the subdivision surface is set to keep boundaries And so you're going to get this kind of stretching and it can be very confusing if you don't know exactly what's what's happening there And this is from the subdivision surface modifier Um, I just put the setting up here because that's more convenient than digging through the properties editor But all you need to do is just switch that in the advanced tab of the modifier Over to keep corners and junctions That'll solve it. Um, I had one project earlier where which is like a hard surface character But it all used sub div and so I was doing that for every single object of every single part of this robot And it got a little bit old So just switching that over to keep corners and junctions when you're working on something like that can be very helpful All right, improving visibility sometimes UVs are a little bit hard to see So there's a couple things that you can do to improve this First of all is just use a check checker texture. That's covered by many videos online I'm sure you know how to do it and if not you can you can look it up pretty easily You just add the texture in the shader editor make sure that's selected set your viewport to textured Um and go from there But I didn't really want to think about it every single time So what we did is just implement it as a actually like zero click thing where you have your Checker and your overlays as a preference and anytime you use the tool it just switches into it So on any objects as long as you have that set and saved in your preferences You just switch to the tool. You're ready to unwrap never have to think about it Um, and I've just I've enjoyed not having to go into the shader editor But again like pretty much every UV editing add-on has that So that's something that's that's pretty easy. Um But it's fun to do Or this is a little like context sensitive So it won't change the other objects if you're in solid mode It won't like put your normal map on the other object. So it keeps it nice and clean, but face opacity Is something that's very helpful. So let's say in your image editor You have your checker texture like that um, and then Let's see. You've got it. I don't know where my image selector went up there. That's just gone Um, let's say you have your checker texture and you're working with UVs It can be a little noisy and hard to see so what you want to do is go to edit and preferences And I'm using a custom theme, but the default blender theme If we go to UV editor right there the face is set to like Something like around here. Um, and sometimes that's just very Challenging to work with so go to face crank this up. Uh, it's much much easier to see Also, you can clear and pin your image. So a lot of times I don't really want to see the image, especially this checker texture While i'm working with UVs. I don't really care about that I want to see it on the model, but I don't want to see it here So what you can do is just in the image editor, uh, you can Go ahead and clear that out and then just make sure you hit this pin button And that keeps it from changing as you switch objects and switch Um between like which material is selected and all that stuff So pin that cleared out. Um, and then as you're working with your Your UVs you get this incredibly clean Just workspace. Um, and it's it's much easier to work with So there is that Um, and then also three overlays is something that was pretty fun to try out So here's an example. Um, actually used some geometry nodes in this one in order to In order to work with this. Uh, let's see if we go to camera view Where'd my object go? It was just there It's gone That's okay. Um, we can make a new object Let's use susan Oh now it's back. I have no idea what that was. Um, but so we have these geometry node overlays That you can apply. Um, and I'll show you how they work if we have the time But first just making seems more visible Sometimes the the default like dark red was hard to see And so just making them absolutely Blinding was kind of fun. Um But also just looks cool. I don't know But some other like actually helpful ones are being able to see the angle stretch In 3d space instead of just in the uv editor And so, um with the stretch information with the grid information oftentimes You don't even need to open the uv editor. You can just do your uv's in the 3d view And as long as you can tell there's no stretching as long as you can tell they're aligned correctly You don't really need anything else. Um, there's also angle or uh area stretching As well as, you know, which udim it's a part of So, uh, the way that that works is just in geometry nodes. Um, what I'm doing is just taking the uv's Looking at the angle of the face corner And then comparing that to the angle of the face corner in 3d space Finding the difference and coloring it like it's it's pretty straightforward But it's pretty helpful to be able to just drag and drop that and apply it if you need to Um, let's see. I wanted to include that with the add-on But there is an issue with enabling the geometry viewers node So I haven't figured that out quite yet, but uh, that will that will be there Okay Next up is straightening Which is something that let's see it takes a it takes a few steps, but blunder is actually It's pretty powerful. Um, what you do to straighten something and the reason this is helpful by the way is you often want to make straight lines and Uh, as you're drawing like if you were drawing a straight line across this pot here Uh, it would just be very pixelated because it's you know shifted in uv space Um, and so it makes text harder to read it makes, um clean lines not look very good So if you have properly straightened uv's you can get away with a much lower texture resolution and have it look just as good so, um, it's actually very Very space saving as well. So a straight Uh uv is just much easier to pack and so you end up getting a lot more out of your textures if you straighten your uv's So the way that you do that in blunder, let's just focus on one section at a time Let's look at this area here Um, and actually let's just look at a single Row first the way that you do this in blunder Is you have a couple different options first you can align. So if you have an edge Just like so, uh, let's Right-click and you can align this edge Frequently horizontally or auto, which is whatever is closest And so you can easily You know, right-click align auto That works pretty well. You can also straighten things. So if you have your uv's A little bit out of whack You can take this whole loop here and then do a straighten And then that'll make it into a vertical line um Which is often helpful, but What we really want to do is make this more grid-like and just straighten it out So the way we do that with is with follow active quads And I'll do that before align rotation What you do is you need to straighten each edge of something that's already fairly, uh, straight So align auto align auto Align auto and align auto select that face and make it the active one Just like so and then select the entire section uv and follow active quads Wherever that is Also in the right-click context menu and there we go now it's straight. Uh, now you can Do whatever you need to do And if this is tilted, um as you unwrap it you can also do an align rotation Which I think is fairly new But it's incredibly helpful. You can just select an edge go to uv align rotation And as long as it's set to edge it lines it straight away You can also align it to the geometry which takes the local object coordinates and uses one of those axes to Sort of try to project the the rotation And that's pretty helpful and then auto. I don't know why it's called auto, but it's actually just straightening the bounding box um Which is works most of the time, but edges like It's very solid. It's very reliable. So I often use that Uh, but the way to work with this on more complex objects because follow active quads is great But you can't do it on things that are not quads Or things that aren't perfect grids So the way that you do that is first you select an island Which is control l in the 3d viewport by the way, and you set your uh select linked to the delimit seam You can select an island like that or if you're using the cut uv tool just double click Somewhere. Whoa Accidentally hit the space bar Okay, let's just go there. Um if you See double click select an island Um, all right. So what you want to do is first align all of the things that are already grid like So if we take these faces and maybe just box select a whole bunch of them Everything that's basically a grid Just like so actually we are going to do the same follow active quads thing. So I may as well Straighten this first before I do the whole selection just to make this a little bit faster again Wine auto wine auto. This is definitely something that will be Automated because I also don't like doing this every single time. Um, okay, so if you do that and then select everything that's A grid just like so That uh Probably use lasso selection, but well all right Let's say something like that then As long as that is the active quad Follow active quads great. Obviously everything else You know gets Bent out of shape, but this one is now straight what you can do is hit p to pin those vertices That's going to keep them exactly there when you unwrap it won't affect That and then when you select everything and then you and unwrap again It'll unwrap those into place. So the workflow for straightening something is you take everything that can be grids You use follow active quads you pin you select everything else And then you unwrap again So again, that's several steps to do something that's it's fairly basic So something that we will definitely just make a one click thing in a 3d viewport Haven't quite gotten to that yet, but it's very high on the list of things to do because again straightening things is incredibly important Uh, so that's quite fun pinning That's how that goes. Um, all right packing so Packing in blender 3.6 as we looked at before is much better now that you can use holes and concave shapes and all of that It's it's really really good A couple things that are helpful is average islands scale So um as we were working with unwrapping Um With the auto unwrap it's you know, all of your islands are not always going to be the same scale because if you're only unwrapping Some things out of time and not the entire object then some might be, you know, bigger than others and take up the whole uv space or what not So if that happens if we just take one section here And you and unwrap and then okay, it's a different scale than everything else in order to make this Uniform just go to uv average island scale and now they're all relative They're they're the same text to density relative to each other and then you can go ahead and pack So that's something that you want to do most of the time Um, I included it in the normal packing options In the tool if you want you can just automatically average island scale as you go Um, but I do that before packing most of the time Also locking in the new packer is really really great. You can go to uv. Let's go pack islands um, and let's do bounding box just so it's faster but you can set the rotation method to access the lines cardinal or any and uh cardinal is incredibly nice, um Because once you've straightened your uv's obviously you don't want them tilted And if you set it to any sometimes they will tilt and then all of that work is Kind of for nothing So what you want to do is set this to something like axis aligned or cardinal and that way it will Rotate them into the best fit but only in 90 degree increments So that's really really nice and one of the new features that i'm very happy about Again, a bunch of these like very small things just add up to make such a big difference And so that's why i'm excited about the uh uv improvements in in recent versions Um, let's see Also locking pinned islands. You can do that. Uh, what was the other one? Oh merge overlapping So this is one that's also extremely helpful because what you want to do oftentimes, especially for Game assets and things is you want to mirror your uv's from one side to the other But maybe not the entire object is mirrored maybe having a character that is asymmetrical in the face And in the body, but the right arm and the left arm can be the same So what you can do in blender Is you can mirror you the the uv's by just flipping one side Overlapping it on the other one and then as long as you have merge overlapping turned on they'll operate as one unit And so you can use that to pack Very easily so that was something that was not in blender before 3.6 And if you had overlapping uv's they would just get split out And it was um anytime you had to do the workflow of mirroring uv's you had to pack it by hand so Again a small change but incredibly helpful Okay, what is next we got margin Um, that's something where obviously you want a little bit of margin on your uv's The reason for that is that when you zoom out, um, you'll get uh some artifacts right along the edges as the texture is down sampled So let's say if we pack this Let's go bounding box We can switch the margin Oh, we can't do it after the fact. There's no redo editor for that one, but uh, you often want a value of Actually, I don't want to say it because I don't have it written down Uh, but you can go to a thread on poly count that has the exact amount of margin that you're generally going to want to have That's specifically for game assets You can get away with less when you're working on films and things like that that aren't going to be down sampled as heavily but um I believe you divide your texture by 128, but I would look that up before actually doing it But that's my general rule of thumb Uh, and then that gives you just the right amount of margin And that's again something that you don't want to think about every time You just want to have whatever your texture resolution set that and then not think about it Um, so that would be helpful to have Also packing so this is probably the biggest one out of all of this is packing by material because in blender Everything is object based you have your different objects. You unwrap them. Um, you export them over to Whatever else you're you're using But if you're painting in marie substance anything else, uh, everything is based on let's say texture sets in the sense of substance But in blender if you're packing everything as objects These two things don't really work together. I mean you can do it that way, but like You want to share your uv space. You want to share your materials? And so packing by material is incredibly important And something that in blender is a little bit cumbersome because you have to select all of your objects that have the same material generally you're Selecting you can go to object mode Like so shift g to select similar And you can select excuse me objects that have a similar material or It's not in there. Then it's in the properties editor But you can select everything that has the same material as whatever the active material is you can go into all of those objects Tab to go into edit mode deselect everything go to the materials tab in the properties editor drop down to select material Then unwrap or then pack all of those things together. So it is a little bit cumbersome, but it is the way you have to do things if you're working in in those applications um, and so I again found that slightly cumbersome. So what we did with packing is if we are using multiple objects that all have different materials Just like so um, and so you can see how these are packed. Let's go and just enable the checker texture Okay um as i'm packing these things Instead of thinking about it, uh, if we use the tools packer We can set what to include Um, whether it's all objects or or just the selected faces whatever but grouped by material Anytime you pack uvs it automatically just groups all materials together And this is something that you can do in object mode as well if I select all of these objects Objects pack You don't have to think about it. It's just all done by material. So I don't know how that would be implemented in blunder like I'm not sure how that would work as far as um affecting different objects that aren't necessarily selected and all of that But packing by material is something that you definitely want to do if you're working with these other applications Um, let's see any other fun packing things I don't think so Uh, now let's look at some things that blunder might potentially change about uvs. This isn't like 100 for sure, but If you go to blunder projects Let's go to not that not that not that But projects about blunder.org Uh, Daniel Byset has a bunch of notes on here From the modeling module Of what he'd like to see changed and a lot of these Are very well written and make a ton of sense. Um, the number one thing that I was Assuming to be asked about afterwards is uh sink selection because that is one of the weirdest things about blunder and uvs And can be definitely frustrating to work with at times And so he has a proposal for exactly how it would work. Um, it could work in the future And I would recommend giving this a read if you'd like, um, but essentially If you select something in the 3d view it would select Both of the associated vertices in the uv editor, but if you select something in the uv editor, it'll, um Not select other vertices in the uv editor. It'll just select the one on the object So it makes a ton of sense and I really really hope that this gets implemented because it would make everything much easier Um, okay, there's also a potential improvement to Uh, just the unwrapping algorithm in general So here's an example of that uh on I think uv pack master has this already Um, but it's just an iterative approach that reduces stretching And you can see that with a basic object, obviously there's no scenes on here. So it's going to be stretched regardless Um, but as it continues to unwrap it just gets better and better And so instead of the regular blunder result, which would be more like this And you get something that's much less stretched So that's a potential improvement that could be coming. It's on the to-do list, but will it happen? Nobody knows um But something that also would be amazing is this grid unwrap Where instead of having to go through and follow active quads and all of that every time you unwrap You just hit grid unwrap and it does it for you during the unwrap process Which would be significantly better and incredibly cool And it works exactly the same way as I outlined Which would be you know, it straightens the grid areas Pins those unwraps the rest as you go So that's something that could potentially happen automatically without you having to go through and Align a quad and all of that stuff More things straightening an island where you take a selected set of edges and It just straightens that out, but then unwraps everything else around it Again very similar to how we already looked at with follow active quads, but instead as A straightened edge rather than a grid Excuse me. All right shifting things up and down Very helpful when you're working on like low resolution images or you have um, you have a, um Atlas of textures, um What's that called at the moment? Like I forget. Um, when you have a bunch of Textures all in one trim sheet. Thank you Yes, when you have a trim sheet, it's very helpful to just snap things up and down And being able to set that in blender and just hit your arrow keys to move between those would be very cool flying textile density Arranging and aligning selected uv islands Unwrapping to the same bounding box. So as you unwrap, it's not taking over the entire uv space You can actually focus on one area, which is Incredibly nice. One other thing that I definitely want to add in that I I tried to implement Um, manually in the uv flow tool is as you double click an island or as you unwrap something it focuses The uv editor on that area um, had some problems with the Context overrides and it was crashing a bunch. So I took that out Um, but jf said that there's a better low level solution to that which we'll look at but Either way being able to zoom in on something and actually unwrap and have it be right there instead of having to constantly move your viewport around amazing stitching islands and having them um be the right scale also very cool and then um A proposal for an automatic uv seam creation tool where essentially it's just finding tool or finding where seams should go based on a set of rules Similar to what we looked at before but a little bit smarter smarter than uh smart projection. So also very cool and um Back to a particular region Which again would be pretty sweet so they could unwrap, you know All of your uv's in one area leave one area empty and then just pack to pack to just there More packed to empty spaces also very sweet so that is Everything that I was going to talk about um Again, if you want to check this out you can go to orange turbine dot com and there's a contact form There and if you just say hey, I'd like to be a beta tester for this tool again, it's called uv flow Then I'll just send it to you in an email And you can help test it which would be incredibly helpful because there are still a couple bugs It's also on the blender market. If you'd like uh on there It also is you get all of the future updates as well rather than just the uh testing versions and Yeah, so that's all of the thoughts that I had on uv's or at least some of them I did trim the talk down a little bit um Any questions or things that you are curious about? Because I'm almost at time cool Yes 80 percent coverage Like uh just packing tighter or I I mean, I think the The 80 percent is just down to the algorithm and I haven't tried implementing a uh packing algorithm So I couldn't tell what the actual Way to achieve that would be but in general the straighter uv's are the tighter they can pack. I'm sure you've already Done as much as you can there You'll often see in blender with it's like 3.6 packer It has all of the it takes all the small islands and puts them on the outside And you often get a lot of wasted space up there uv pack master does that less But still a little bit. So maybe that's where they're getting it from is just Better utilizing the boundary And then packing that inside the other objects rather than along the edges would be my guess but I don't know for sure Any other questions Okay, then for the rest of the time you can Come up if you'd like to get ready and I'll just unwrap stuff for fun