It's a problem I always had and never found a way or a script to solve, it's very annoying! Everytime I use Straighten Selection on 3Ds Max (2014 and 2015) UV editor it stretches the UVs and I have to manually redo. Isn't there a way of making Straighten Selection "respect" the relaxed UVs?
Here is the relaxed uvs, it's a cylinder kind of shape (I turned on "show edge distortion" so you have a better view of the problem):
Here is the same uvs with straighten selection applied. As you can see it's stretching a lot the center part of the mesh:
After I have to manually redo, so it looks like this:
Hi. "Unfold Strip From Loop" tool does a better job at maintaining UV proportions than Straighten tool, imo. As I mention in the attached pic, you must have a detached group of polys to do this. If your UVs share edges with another UV cluster, then Unfold Strip will straighten other parts of your model's UVs as well, and you may not want this. Also, it will scale your UV cluster and may need to re-scale it after. Try it on a copy object before you commit to using this tool.
1. Collpase your stack.
2. In sub-object Edit Poly, select a group of polys and detach as Element if they aren't already.
3. Apply Unwrap. In sub-obj UV Edge mode, select the outermost edge and choose Edge Loop (or double click edge in UV Editor).
4. Choose "Unfold Strip From Loop" in modifiy panel under Wrap Rollout.
See attached pic. (Sorry about the typo and messy notes.)
Unfortunately for me, this crashes my 3ds Max every time. 😞
I have put a support ticket in for this.
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