a few things I would like to add in that list:
- The UV viewport currently does not seem to activate until you dive into a SOP network. This is very bad as many digital assets that do work on UV need to be jumped into (by users) to even get UVs to show up. you can repro this by
opening a new scene,
creating a sphere object and a box object,
inside each SOP network, unwrap UVs,
exit SOP context,
save and open a new scene,
then re-open the scene
Note that UVs will not show up in the scene view until the user dives again into those sop networks
- User should be able to specify in the viewport display option what attribute is the UV attribute to display (a bit like how the override color attribute option works) and it should not be “hardcoded” to attributes called UV. Currently, layer nodes have to be used in order to switch the UVs displayed.
- When I think of UVs. I REALLY feel we need to think on ways on how to minimize to remove the need to do too much thinkering with UVs. I feel implementing new unwrapping algorithms could go a very long way. The least Squares Conformal maps (LSCM) method probably has one of the best methods for both unwrapping and laying out islands within their organic boundaries (note that this is available in other software)
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~misha/Fall09/Levy02.pdf [
cs.jhu.edu]
The current unwrapping method of pelting does not generate ideal UVs, and the UVUnwrap lays out pieces on rectangular bounds, wasting a lot of space and requiring a lot of manual work (I was working on my own implementation of a fitting algorithm, but I feel this should be available in the main package
- UV smoothing “evens out” uvs across the 0-1 UV mapping surface, but this is not ideal. UV relaxing, where UV spacing adjusts itself to match the area of the primitive surface in 3D space is much more ideal (see maya's relax UV option with pinned borders)
- I feel UV viewport should respect the same rules that the other viewports follow in regards to the “other objects” visibility controls. Currently, once UVs “activate” in the UV viewport, a user has to hide objects in order to hide UVs. If a user enters a SOP network, and Hide Other Objects is on, UVs should follow suite
I will add to this: Kudos on allowing the user to both use geometry functions such as paint inside of the UV viewport (VERY USEFUL) as well as UV operations in the 3D viewport such as UV Paint. Love that I can mix and match the 2d and 3d operations!