Real-world scale texture preview UV editor

[Anonymous]

Hello,

When working in real-world scale, is there a way to display the accurate (real-world) size of the textures in the UV editor?

When using masks that need to be placed on a specific area on the model, it's very tedious to offset the texture or UV island to where it needs to be, as there's no preview of the texture available in the UV editor, I'm basically eyeballing the result.

Is there a workaround or 3rd party tools that can be used for this?

Perhaps offsetting the texture in the viewport by dragging, instead of changing the offset value in the bitmap or moving the UV island around.

Any help is very much appreciated!

[jon.bell]

Hi ELA,

Thanks for your question. I'm curious if you're talking about trying to tweak textures in the UVW Unwrap modifier menu, or simply via regular UVW mapping modifiers. If it's the latter, you should be able to adjust your texture placement (for decal-type textures, with alpha) by showing the specific bitmap in a Shaded viewport and by applying it with a second set of mapping coordinates (with a different Material ID number from the underlying base material.)

Can you please take a look at the attached 3ds Max 2019 sample file to see an example?

Please let me know if this helps, and I hope to hear from you soon!

Best regards,

[Anonymous]

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@jon.bell wrote:

Hi ELA,

Thanks for your question. I'm curious if you're talking about trying to tweak textures in the UVW Unwrap modifier menu, or simply via regular UVW mapping modifiers. If it's the latter, you should be able to adjust your texture placement (for decal-type textures, with alpha) by showing the specific bitmap in a Shaded viewport and by applying it with a second set of mapping coordinates (with a different Material ID number from the underlying base material.)

Can you please take a look at the attached 3ds Max 2019 sample file to see an example?

Please let me know if this helps, and I hope to hear from you soon!

Best regards,

---

Hi Jon,

Thank you for the example. Using the gizmo of the UVW Map modifier is indeed a good option to change the position of the UV shells on the texture. 

I was looking for an accurate preview of the texture size in the UV editor from the Unwrap UVW modifier, but on second thought, that may not be exactly what I'm looking for.

I'm actually looking for something similar to the gizmo of the UVW Map. but instead of changing the UV shells position or size, I'd like the texture offset value (or in case of scaling, the texture size) to change. 

So let's say I have a model with real-world scale UV's and a real-world scale texture. However, I don't know the exact size of the texture. I could change the values in the bitmap settings until I've found something that works. But instead, it would be easier if I could just move the texture and scale it, same as you would with the gizmo, and then get to the right values.

I'm working with models that come in different texture variations, therefore I want to stay away from adjusting the UV to that particular texture, but instead change the texture/bitmap settings.

Is there any way to do this? Or perhaps a plugin that could?

Thanks!

Eveline

[Anonymous]

To make things a whole lot easier, you can simply open the texture in an imaging app, or navigate to the texture's directory folder, right click the image and view the image dimensions there, instead of guessing the dimensions without any of that.

[Anonymous]

I'm referring to knowing the size of the texture in the real world. The texture file could be 3840 px, but my struggle is to know what the size of the original product should be, is it a 10 x 10" swatch or bigger? There's no way to know that. And of course we can change the UV shells, it's just more convenient if we would be able to scale, move, rotate the texture itself to get the right scale and placement on the model.