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  • Published 17 Sep 2018

UV Island relax algorithm and usage overhaul

Blender's two standard UV algorithms "ABF+" and "LSCM" are bread and butter for UV unwrapping but over the years there have been more efficient additional ways of dealing with organic UVs. Modo's "adaptive" relax algorithm for example does a superb job in relaxing UV islands that might need more cuts in Blender in order to be unwrap with little distortion. Another nice addition to the whole thing would be if the relax command could be invoked over already unwrapped UV islands iteratively. Basically like the UV relax command but instead of making thins worse the algorithm actually makes it better. So the relax command should not just smooth out the polygons in the UV editor by themselves but actually reiterate over the islands relative to the mesh.

Think for eample of these steps:

  • You set our seams and unwrap, getting an okayish result
  • You run a different UV relax metod over your UV islands and achieve a little less stretching (let's say you chose a different type of relax) but are getting some overlaps.
  • so you sculpt, push and rotate your UVs to a better distribution but gained some really ugly, uneven stretching.
  • so instead of running "smooth" and maybe getting even more (albeit more regular) distortion over the whole island you simply invoke the relax algorithm with a low iteration over the current layout. That way you can pull your uneven distribution closer to the actual meshflow and achieve middle ground with probably way better UVs without tons of cuts.

This is an example with Angle based unwrapping left and 500 iterations over the same unwrap with the "adaptive" algorithm to the right. Image

So my proposal here is:

  1. Add more and more current relax algorithms
  2. enable to iterate an actual relax over the UV islands instead of just "smooth" which does more bad than good, in most cases

Modo_Relax.png

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 52 Downvote 0
Alex-D
17 Sep 2018

8 Comments

mattLi

yes..!!! I've been searching/begging for a proper relax tool in Blender for a good while now. I am forced to go back to 3DS Max/somewhere else, since Blender just crushes / skews stuff like crazy sometimes. As said above, we need a iterative / looping relax that can pull it apart over time and relax based on angle/edges and also respect the 3D Geo actually. Blender "relax" tools will often crush the UVS and not resemble the geo at all.

3
dpdpforlife

Agreed. We need Aurel Gruber to integrate his algorithm into Blender what ever happened to this:

youtube.com/watch

2
Alex-D Author

@dpdpforlife:

I'm afraid this project has been abandoned. I was very excited when I saw it, as well. It seems he's begun a fulltime job before he finished the project. So the algorithm is out there but so far I've only seen people post about it in custom compiled builds.

It seems to be in a somehow working state but it's not finished or integrated.

mattLi

I've started to use UVLayout/Bridge lately , since nothing has happened with this in years.... I was using 3DS Max to Unwrap, but got annoyed with the back and forth. Headus UVLayout has been working great though/is pretty seamless. But I sitll really hope for a properly integrated solution..

steinn8989

I will say, if possible, as an ordinary user who switched from another program, I hope they don’t get banned here for mentioning other software .... but just relax like in the 3ds max application, in this application in the uv editor all the islands are just highlighted! and the relax button is pressed, the result is perfect, without this function it is impossible to work !

sorry for the possibly inaccurate translation of google

1
Alex-D Author

I know this is a super specialized commercial grade software but the selective refinement of individual islands is something that is so useful and cool: youtube.com/watch

Modo has a similar feature where only selected islands can be iteratively relaxed. Even if we can get only a fraction integrated into blender - this would be extremely helpful!

1
fleewortep

Yes please! i'm surprised that there is now proper relax tool in blender. I couldnt even find it in addons like UV toolkit

ChameleonScales

For those who missed the BA thread : blenderartists.org/t/uv-unwrapping-slim-algorithm-in-development-suspended/688922

If you reeeeaaaally need to use this right now you can follow the instructions there to build the old 2.79 branch that had it working. Otherwise merge it back up yourself or wait until there are enough devs so that one wants to do this. That should be a little while after Apple becomes a patron, hahaha eloel.