Display UVs in Object Mode
Ability to see UV islands upon object selection in Object Mode, so we don’t need to select multiple objects and go to Edit Mode just to check how a texture atlas is packed or which UVs correspond to each object.
Implemented! 🎉
This has been implemented by T0MIS0N and it is now part of Blender 4.5 LTS alpha. projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/135102
26 Comments
The UV editor needs quite a bit of love in general, this would be an excellent addition
Yeah, I love that feature. See at a glance, no BS.
Yea, I'm always wondering why it doesn't....
Should be considered a bug... lol...
This is another unusual thing in Blender. When you select a texture node, nothing appears in image viewer. Same thing here. In my opinion the uv viewport also needs a list of available uv channels. so in case your mesh got more then one. It could be done in the same way then mesh is sync. displayed in multiple viewports. So the standard uvs are displayed grey and when selecting polygons the get highlighted.
Yeah it's a real pain point that it doesn't already function this way.
It is implemented in Zen UV addon
youtu.be/iUoGZeMTlYo
This kind of functionality becomes extremely important in a UDIM workflow. You have to be able to see which objects/faces are in which UDIM. Without it you cannot plan or see what UDIM's are being used without going into edit mode for every single object. This is sometimes impossible if you have a complex model - going into edit mode produces a jump in memory used and can easily overwhelm even a beefy system with over 96GB of RAM.
I would suggest it be in the format of a toggle that you can toggle on and off, with the default being off. It is not required at all times, but when it is needed, it is REALLY needed. Currently my only solution is to load up Maya to look at my UV's on complex objects.
Suggestion kind of nonsence. UV's is not only about " packed atlas " workflow. What when you have some architectural model with 30 materials and each with it's own box mapping or mapped for some different texture? Here my typical work landmark model. Look at this UV mess when you try to look at all UV's .... Most of materials is tiled mapping which have nothing to do with any " atlas ".
The only usable info you can check is UVs for one material.
It may looks OMG cool feature when you mesure things with 3 boxes in empty scene. In real work things looks a bit different. After all question - what a goal to see some questionable UV's without going to edit mode, why not Edit mode? To see mesh data need to unpack this data, kind of same as going inside Edit Mode.
Lot of work for potencial developer mostly for nothing....
* @IIIFGIII * So, maybe make it a button to toggle visibility on and off? This really is a necessity for people in the games industry.
* @alejandromedinapons * I'm not against it, just concluded that it's not kind of for everyone feature.
* @IIIFGIII * I think that your workflow might be more edge-case that you think. A lot of other 3d apps do show UV's when the object is selected - maya, max, etc. If this change to the UV editor does get implemented you will be able to work around it by separating your meshes into a few more objects.
* @IIIFGIII * Work for nothing? LMAO.
You need a break from blender, and start looking at how the standard 3d apps work.
Unbelievable.
* @ThinkingPolygons *
Not " for nothing " but " mostly for nothing " .... Big difference.
If you will try to analyze potential usage - not so common & necessary thing. Most of time, most of users will don't use it and dont need it and will just turn it OFF to not drop performance and get lag each time when some new object is selected.
To not get cases when you have lag just because Blender immediatly try to get access to mesh data to show you UV's when you just want to select object and do something like move, link, etc. Even worse if we talk not about object but about objects (lot of them).... like you select 20 objects with around 1 500 000 triangles together and just want to move but NOPE - now you wait 15 seconds before Blender just extract all mesh data to show UV's....
Am I wrong?
We had before good feature for multi object UV's visualizing instead and it was perfect for props/character workflows. But now it's gone because they added multi edit mode which cant be disabled... But it's not the best decision IMO.
* @Matthew Cooke * I work with Max many years. Don't tell here tales about what Max show. It show UV's as Unwrap modifier on top of Edit Poly or else. It's not " showing UV's in object mode " case.... Not even close.
* @IIIFGIII * It seems that you are generalizing use-cases a bit here and making some assumptions about "most users". Performance wise, you might be right, I'm not sure about Blender's under the hood set-up with regards to UV's. Maya seems to manage this fine, so I'm sure it's not an insurmountable problem.
* @Matthew Cooke * I'm not against, I can be wrong.
* @IIIFGIII * It’s about selected, and you can always hide the up viewport. Box mapping uvs are a bit senseless too. Anyway, Modo for example, has an option called show inactive mesh in up viewport. Which also means that active will always shown. But then why opening UV viewport that is empty all the time? A bit senseless waste of screen space.
* @IIIFGIII * I'm not totally agree with you, in my case some of the objects is just too heavy if I select them all and go to edit mode only to see the uv layout.
In our studio we have an alembic fx asset which is very dense in terms of vertices,, when we want to do a simple painting for baking, we need to make sure that the uv is alright, and often enough I kept annoyed why I need to go to edit mode only to check them because my viewport going to be so slow if I went to Edit mode.
Not only this, we also have a geo for animation and geo for rendering, so both of them sometime have a uv discrepancy that I need to check both their uvs, and again I can't do a check from object mode which is not quite comfortable imo.
As someone who has come from Max and then Maya, the ability to see the UVs for an entire object is something I miss terribly in Blender. This is absolutely necessary, at least as a toggle similar to "UV Sync Selection" if performance is a problem. Uses I can think of:
* @Valentin Nadolu * For 2. I just discovered there's a "Modified Edges" option in the Show Overlays menu of the UV Editor that shows the UVs after modifiers.
This would be Fockin OSOM!
There is a plug in that does it semi-succesful, but this should really work properly out of the box.
What's the plugin if I may ask?
This has already been proposed and is in development: blender.community/c/rightclickselect/BDcbbc/
* @daniellapalme *
But your link to suggestion for UV highlight in edit mode. Show UV data in object mode is different....
* @IIIFGIII * oops, I meant to post this on his other UV, proposal, that's embarrassing.