User:Chris Blackbourn/BlogDraft

What’s new in UV Mapping in Blender?
Good UV Mapping starts with a balancing act. We always have to trade off distortion against seams against texel density.

Lets dive right in by repairing this seam with Unwrap Selection

Great! Now we can reduce the distortion with Minimize Stretch. BTW, it now fixes flipped faces.

Okay, time for texel density. Lets pin those corners and switch over to the new geometry relax brush which uses the shape of the geometry to drive the shape of the UVs:

Composable and Orthogonal
One of the recent themes is making all of the pieces of the UV toolset work nicely together:


 * UV Sculpt tools now works with pins
 * Live unwrap now works with UV Sculpt tools
 * Transform tool now works with Constrain To Image Bounds (including rotation !)
 * UV projection now works with multiple non-square materials.
 * UV projection now works with selection.
 * UV Islands now works (correctly) with edge selection mode

If you notice any of these ABC doesn’t play nicely with XYZ type issues remaining, please file a bug and we’ll get it sorted!

Average Islands Scale
A quick shout out to new options in Average Islands Scale!

The original version evens out texel density between different islands.


 * With the new Non-Uniform option, differences between the U axis and V axis are balanced.
 * And with the Shear option, the U axis and V axis will be balanced back to 90°, further reducing texture distortion.

Blender Present
What’s happening right now in UV mapping?

One word, “Packing”

Currently in Blender we use the Axis-Aligned-Bounding-Box (AABB) method for packing. Each UV island is packed into it's AABB, and then the AABBs are packed into the unit square.

Look at all that wasted space! Lets fill it up with all those circles. That'll be coming soon to blender. It might even be available in the nightly builds by the time you're reading this.

Blender Future
And what comes after that? That’s the great thing about blender and open source development, YOU get to decide.


 * More game developer features.
 * Better UDIM support.
 * Support for million+ polygon architectural scenes.
 * Automatic seam placement.
 * Optimized UV layout based on an existing Lightmap.
 * Maybe it’s a One-Click “Just Unwrap It For Me” button.
 * Something else?

Get involved and let us know what you want!