UV-Mapping Overhaul

Hi there!
So today I opened up the UV editor for the first time. Quite frankly, I immediately wanted to close it again, if it wasn't for my curiosity. As I read a few times, that the UV editing is far from finished, I thought it could help to have a healthy discussion on how this thing should work at the end and hopefully give IStonia some hints at what to tackle.

The first thing I had to do was to change the grid color, because it hurt my eyes (changed it to dark grey and lightened up the background). Second thing I noticed is the lattice that appears if I select UVs. I don't like that, because it's very different from what you're doing in other parts of the program. And the third thing, that puzzled me was that my undo hotkey didn't have the assignment I gave it to! And at last, I tried to find out, how to dock the editor window beside my perspective view, with no luck. I will not continue with the stock taking, but will give to you the suggestions I have in mind for good uv editing. These stem from memory and experience.

I'd like to be able to have my 3d view and the uv editor side by side. I didn't even find some layout options on how to arrange the views. I haven't noticed that until now, because mostly I only work in the perspective view when modelling. I know from Maya and Blender that you can put any editor or view into a working area (e.g. window).

I like Silo's approach to make uv editing feel like you haven't switched from modelling. All selection tools and options should still work the same and have the same hotkeys assigned, as the polygon selection tools. That includes switching components mode, enabling soft-selection, loop- path- and ring-selection, deselecing, inverting, growing and shrinking, converting selections, select hard edges and all the other nice features. Of course move, rotate and scale should be working as expected, a lattice modifier should be a tool. All the snapping options should apply as well. Some functions from modelling that don't add or remove vertices (but do alter UVs) should still be working, like flip, relax, split or weld. Symmetry would also be a nice feature.

In Maya you have a different set of radial menus in the uv editor, contextualized for working with UVs.

It's also important to be able to work on UVs from multiple objects simultaneously, as they might share the same textures. So I can make an UV layout of the different shells.

Now on to specific UV editing related functions I often use. A former colleague of mine wrote a tool for Maya that was very popular at the office. It should be possible to move/scale/rotate UVs by a custom amount. Type in a value and click the button of your choice. In addition, a checkbox to indicate that I want to move the whole shell or shells would be nice, too. As for scaling and rotation, the pivot should be eligible, either selection, first selected or coordinate center and what else you can think of. As I said before, the modelling options should apply like scaling/rotating selected shells altogether or each seperately ("maintain object position/scaling" etc.). Something I often used from our maya tools was selecting 2 UVs and then either align these 2 horizontally or vertically while moving the shell with them. Or something like standard maya tools: select UVs and move all either up to the top selected UV, or down to the lowest, most left or most right. I often used that to essentially straighten a line. Another great thing, not just for organic modelling, is pinning UVs and then unwrap. Most of the time I didn't even need pinning. I moved some vertices where I wanted them to, then marquee-invert-selected the shell and used unwrap on the selection. An indispensable tool is "move and weld". Select a face/edge/vertex and join its corresponding UVs. Before you do that you might want to match the scale, so a tool for that is needed. The way we did it was to select 2 UVs and measure the distance (gets automatically put into an input field) and then select 2 other UVs (maybe from the same edge) and hit the 'scale to distance'-button (either just these 2 or the whole shell). If you have lots of UV-shells, you probably don't want to lay them out by hand. So a UV layout tool would be convenient with the options for maintain rotation/scale, or allow 90° rotation as well as how much space should be between shells. Mayas option to simply choose what texture resolution you're aiming for, I find most convenient for the latter.

Something I have seen in another program that could be of visual guidance as well as for later texture creation is to give UV shells random colors or assign them colors. When taking a UV Snapshot, there was a function to fill the shells with the colors. You practically get a simple, instant diffuse texture (use it for masking etc.).

So what do you use in your UV workflow that you'd like to see in NVIL?

If the position of your manipulator handle moves out of the view in NVIL, it gets displayed at a vicarious position inside the view which is cool. I was just thinking that this behaviour should be maintained inside the UV editor. To also have the tools available for manipulating the position of the handle as you have when modelling, could also be of use for the transformations (including via direct input/offset). I'd also like to see the function to transform in defined steppings when holding ctrl.

ya i got a big list of things for the UV side of things, since i use maya with tons and tons of my own scripts for doing UV's.

will make a post when i got more than a few min to take it all down.

I hope you'll find the time soon. It'll sure be kindly appreciated.

I didn't do a full evaluation on the current UV editor in NVIL, so much of the stuff I'm suggesting may already be functional.

Of course some camera navigation functions should work the same as in modelling like 'fit all to view' or 'zoom in on selected'.
Some more things I remember from Maya: The grid doesn't fill the whole view, you can customize it. Should be the same as the 3d-view-grid-customization with an option on where to display the units. If the units would move out of the view, they should stick to the border of the view. When displaying a texture on the background, one should be able to adjust its brightness or transparency. There should also be an easy to access button on turning alpha channel on and off, maybe even each channel of RGBA (as you might use different channels for black & white textures like spec, height etc. in a single texture). The Tiling of the texture in the background should as well be customizable. When I had a generic texture and placed a lot of shells on there, I don't want them to overlap, so I used the space outside of 0-1, and still have a grid and texture.
One should be able to have more than 1 UV set on an object (think lightmaps etc.).

Boy, UV editing development needs quite some attention! Doing UV layouts was always unrewarding, but nevertheless relaxing. It should feel like a walk in the park.

Whoa, a quick addition: Something I never got to use myself, but I know that it exists out there is the color coding of UV-edges depending on the stretch! Unfortunately I don't know how "they" go about it, but must have something to do with the actual face area correlated to texture space, or edge length to UV distance, skew or whatever.

One other thing: like flipped faces are shaded differently in modelling, so should flipped UVs.

What do you think? If the UV editor would move inside the main frame, meaning the UV view being displayable inside one of the 3d views, would it suffice, if the UV tools moved to the visual tools window? There you could make changes to how the tools behave. You could also have your custom user toolbar.

Are you asking me? I think it's a good idea. I need some time to figure out how to do it.

would oljy be a good idea to have the uv editor in a frame ad long as it is still possbile to use it windowed, otherwise it will really fuck with multi display users.

While probably unpopular...
I personally found far better not to work on the UV-Tools and to instead remove that workspace from Nvil altogher - at least for the first release.

One needed hundreds if not thousands of programming-hours to get it into a state which matches the power of the rest of the application.
I don't see the point: Every user of Nvil moves finished models over to another program with decent UV-Editor anyway!

Like with modelling it again required a crazy lot of user-feedback to come up with solutions which match advanced expectations. To me this appears like wasted effort and like opening another can of worms before having finished the first assignment.

@IStonia: I wasn't asking you in particular, but your opinion is of course of great importance, since it's your baby and you know best what can be implemented. I thought if we had a duscussion about it, the resulting design would be of more value to everybody.

@Passerby: I agree with you, that's why I already made a feature request that concerns that very issue and overall the view layout. I find having only the windowed version of the UV-editor may be annoying for single display users like me.

ya i just mean implement it like maya, where it is both a viewport type and a window. since i do remember back in the signal monitor days how much of a pain in the ass programs like max were for uv's.

A new selection method could also come in handy: to UV Shell. You may know it from Maya. It takes the selected component/s and expands the selection to every component that connects to the corresponding UV shell/s.

Ok, I found out, that the lattice is indeed a separate tool. That's a plus. Unfortunately there are many more minus'es. Apparently the UV Map window can only be opened when in polygon mode. When switching the mode, the editor simply closes! When I select a few edges, I am not able to move them together with the move tool, without switching to vertex mode first. The snap options don't work. The 0-1 space could be more visible plus more grid options, like in the 3d views (displaying units and what not). More hotkeys don't work, like 'Invert Selection'. There's no dedicated area in the hotkey preferences concerning the UVs, as well as for streamline tools, I believe.

I could rant on, but I have the feeling, it would be a good advice to redo this again from scratch, integrating it more with the rest.

I tried to map a simple object, it was a disaster. I hope this gets worked on soon. It will be a lot of work, I suppose. But NVil has such great selection and modeling tools, it's a shame I have to switch to another program just for UV-mapping. I just say it again: It should be considered doing it again from scratch with much more integration in the overall workflow in mind. It's not even integrated with the hotkeys right now. Being able to display the UV-view in a regular viewport would be nice. Radial menus should be supported, therefor the UV tools should enqueue with the other tools. Make it an own category, like UVs are a subobject. I should even be able to select UVs in the 3d views. If I select a "UV-vertex", then all the UVs that this vertex has should be selected. If I select an edge in 3d view, the according "UV-edges" should be selected, so I can easily move and sew (which I didn't find yet) or split. The weld tool should also work for UVs. Such tools will probably be situated in the proposed new UV-as-a-subobject-category. I imagine it like selecting a bunch of faces, converting the selection to border edges and split UVs, then undoing subobject selection, converting to inner edges and move and sew. Or a dedicated "make UV shell from selected faces"-command that automates the process. Since there is that powerful streamline engine, it should be utilized for UVs, too.

ya this part of the app needs so much work.

i find for hte most part it dosnt bother me that much, since i use the clipboard feature and one of my maya scripts to bring things between maya and nvil with 1 button. Which works great for workflows where i do all modeling upfront, than UV after the fact.

But for more and more environment art, i tend to UV as i build, especially in cases where im using spline extrudes and the slide tool to build my geo.

EDIT:
Maybe when i have less work todo, i should record my UV mapping workflow in maya from a mesh i brought in from nvil. and Talk about how i think what im doing could be implemented in NVil.

My focus is game art, so i think i might even also record my whole workflow for game prop at some point, and talk about how i use differnt tools like nvil while doing it.

i use quite a mix of apps but nvil is what i use for the majority of my high and low poly modeling. Than for maya for UV's and creating the bake cage, and tweaks. than Xnormal for the bakes. NDO2 for additional normal map detail, than PS, and finally off 2 udk and unity for rendering.