[Bf-funboard] Improving the uv editor

[William Reynish]

Wow Brecht! This sounds most promising! I haven't been
able to use your patches to test stuff, although I
have commented your ideas and how you describe they
work.


> Selection Tools
> 
> You probably know it's not easy to get the right tex
> vertices selected.
> We need the ability to select them both in the 3d
> view and the image
> window. Why not allow you to do this with the LMB?
> You don't need it in
> faceselect mode. Ok, you can grab/scale/rotate the
> whole mesh relative
> to the 3d cursor in faceselect mode, but noone goes
> into faceselect mode
> to do this, right? A modifier key could be used
> instead, for
> consistency's sake.

Hmm..  I would probably prefer not to assign "Select
UVs in 3D View" (Or whatever we end up calling it)
only to LMB. Better to make this a more obvious
feature and include a checkmark menu item in the
UV/Image Editor menu system (available in recent
compiles) so that the user can "see" this feature and
turn it on and off as he/she pleases. Ofcourse I see
nothing wrong with making LMB or Ctrl-LMB also doing
the same thing if you like. I just think it is good to
make these things clear.

Maybe it could be designed so that with the menu item
on, you could select faces in the 3D window by
selecting UV coordinates, as well as being able to
select UVs by selecting faces in the 3D window. In
other words making it work both ways. Ofcourse the
menu item name would have to chanhe to reflect this.
How about "Unify Selection with 3D Window"? Something
like that maybe.



> You also often need to select all tex vertices that
> are on top of each
> other in the image window. Why not use LMB here too?
> There isn't even a
> 3d cursor in the image window.

Well, for the same reasons as above I would prefer if
there was at least a way to do the same thing through
the menu system, otherwise I fear it will become a bit
of an "expert feature" that no newbie knows about.

It's great that you are going to do this, UV mapping
is a area where Blender is admittadly poor. These
changes will improve Blenders mapping features
somewhat!


> Sometimes you also want to select exactly one tex
> vertex, but you can't
> because there are other tex vertices in the same
> place. I've got a kind
> of hackish tool for this. What is basicly does is
> that is scales down
> all faces individually by 10%, so you can clearly
> see which tex vertex
> belongs to which face. When you apply this tool
> again, it will scale up
> everything by 10%. This isn't really great, since it
> changes the data
> for a selection, which is quite unexpected
> behaviour, but it works for
> me. 
> 
> Bf-Blender Patch (current hotkey is 'M'):
>
http://users.pandora.be/blendix/blender/patch_show_doubles.txt
> 
> As you're often working with 'Altas' uv maps, you
> want to select
> complete 'Islands'. This is what the Island Select
> tool is for. It kind
> of works like Select Linked in the 3d view. There's
> one problem for this
> however, and I have this problem too with other
> tools. As no texture
> faces are really connected, you need to check the
> distance between them.
> But how do you choose this distance? It isn't really
> practical to ask
> for it with every tool you use. I think it would be
> best to add a
> numeric value input to bjornmose's uv panel in the
> buttons window, so
> it's value can be used by all tools.
> 
> Bf-Blender Patch (look in the image window menu's):
>
http://users.pandora.be/blendix/blender/patch_heal_link.txt

Ghasp, sounds very nice! That's wonderful!

> Sometimes you want to take a piece of an Island and
> move it somewhere
> else. I made an 'Unlink Selection' tool that, based
> on an existing
> selection, only selects those faces that have all
> tex vertices selected.
> This tool is in the previous patch.

Yup, good idea!

> You might also want to select faces in the image
> window instead of the
> faceselect mode. A hide/unhide function for the
> image window should
> solve this.
> Bf-Blender Patch (same hotkeys as in 3d view):
>
http://users.pandora.be/blendix/blender/patch_heal_link.txt

Sorry, is it also in the Image Editor menu system? If
not, I would suggest placing it in the "UVs" menu.
Great addition!



> Merging and Stitching
> 
> When you're manually moving around tex vertices you
> often want to
> 'merge' them in the same place. This is what the
> Heal UV tools is for
> (name taken from Softimage, it doesn't really
> explain the
> functionality). It 'merges' all selected tex
> vertices together that
> share the same vertex. It can also work based on
> distance, if you want
> to 'globally heal' the uv map. It can be used when
> stitching two islands
> together.

Wow, great! I'd love to try this!

> Bf-Blender Patch (look in the image window menu's):
>
http://users.pandora.be/blendix/blender/patch_heal_link.txt
> 
> Distortion/Stretching
> 
> Until there is a 'relax uv' tool (multiple of these
> algorithms are
> avaible in Graphite)

Whoa 'Relax UVs' would be exceptionally useful! It's
great that this ammount of attention is being paid to
the UV/Image Editor.

, we can offer tools for
> manually resolving this. It
> would be nice if these distortions could be
> visualized in the image
> window. Length distortion could be visually
> represented (when activating
> a function in the view menu) by giving each face a
> color based on it's
> distortion. Angular distortion can be visualised
> pretty much the same
> way, but by using different vertex colors in each
> angle. One problem
> here is that you have to calculate this distortion
> based on a global
> scale. If the user decides to give two islands a
> different scale, the
> islands will be colored because they are considered
> distorted. This
> isn't really a problem, because as long as one
> island has the same
> colors, you know it isn't distored. This coloring
> also comes in handy to
> give islands exactly the same scale.

Sounds nice, that would greatly help remove
distortion. Did you get this idea from another app? It
sounds very good!

> Drawing alpha'd faces without distortion colors is
> also usefull, to see
> if there are any overlapping faces.

Yes indeed.

> To manually correct distorion on organic shapes, a
> proportional editing
> tool in the image window could be handy too. 

Oh yes, extremely so!

>A built-in checker map
> would be nice also.

Yeah, thart would definitely be handy. That reminds me
of softimage where I often use the inbuilt one to
check how things are progressing. 

> Undo
>(shotened) 

Undo would be very nice. I am looking forward to the
day when we have it implemented across the board, From
Object Mode in the 3D Window through the UV/Image
Editor to the Sequencer. Good to see progress on this
front!

On the whole, this sounds like some very good stuff.
Texturing and UV support has always been a bit weak in
Blender, but this is apparently soon to change! You
even seem to suggest that 'Relax UVs' (an extremely
useful highend UV tool) will be quite possible to
implement. This is very good news indeed my friend!

Cheers,

-William

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