UV Overhaul!! Proposal 2 - UV Outliner
Hello Everyone! Continuing from Proposal 1
My second proposal is a UV outliner! This outliner would allow the user to hide, select, name and group UV islands of the object you are currently working on. It should be located within the "N" panel of the UV workspace to allow the ability to toggle the visibility and to avoid cluttering.
In order for this to work i theorize the creation of "UV Groups" upon unwrap could allow for such features since it would leave vertex groups out of the equation and would allow things such as modifiers to be applied to UV islands individually such as "Relax", "Square" (Which would align island border edges to the x and y axis) or a Texel Density modifier that would scale UVs according to a set resolution. They should allow multiple islands to be parented just like any other object in the 3d viewport outliner allowing them to be scaled and rotated uniformly without the fear of varying texture resolutions due to human error
This would also allow the the editing of multiple object UVs at a time way more efficient and make working with higher density/complexity meshes a breeze. We would be able to tag, and label our UV islands (UV Groups) visually with the appropriate name given in the outliner via the click of a button called "Enable Tags" directly under the latter or via shortcut.
Since 2.81 is finally giving UDIMs a thought, it will be increasingly difficult to manage UVs within Blender and a feature such as this might be just what is needed to manage scenes with ginormous amounts of object UVs and UDIMs with varying amounts of detail and texture resolution.
4 Comments
Out of curiosity, can't you use vertex groups for a lot of this? If not, then how do you think it should work and where in the Blender interface would you put these controls. Mock-ups would be a big help.
* @Jason van Gumster * Vertex groups are also used for animation, weight paint, materials, blend shapes. They are far too busy to work with when managing UVs, not to mention they are not easily accessible. As far as mockups go, i am no UI/UX designer but i think it would be better off in the "N" panel within the UV workspace.
* @nicholasfrancavilla1997 * Sure they're also used for those things, but my point is that the underlying structure is already there to support this. Perhaps the interface for vertex groups (in addition to edge and face groups, which have also already been proposed) could be improved to better support these different use-cases.
Why add redundant functionality when we can improve what's already there?
* @Jason van Gumster * A good point indeed. The functionality is there and can be adjusted by such a degree. What i am suggesting is an outliner where all of your UV islands can be managed, organized, grouped, parented and named visually without interfering with vertex groups as a whole. Possibly the creation of UV groups could be in order, since it would allow for more feature flexibility down the line (UV modifiers and such); UV islands should be treated as objects are in the viewport outliner. With UDIMS coming into blender in 2.81 it is going to be harder and harder to manage UVs that span more than 3x3 UV tiles. This is why i deem it necessary and why a UV system overhaul is Absolutely necessary.