UV improvements + interactive modern Texture placement + bug fixes

[BenediZ]

1.) New Geometry should not mess up the existing UV layout.

It should be possible to let new UV to be created into a different tile.

see screenshots

It also should get a proper density (average of the existing layout elements).

And why doesn't the UV shell even try, to match the shape of a face?

Example: If you create a rectangular of a aspect ratio of "1 height and 10 width" with an extrude, why leads that to a square? (everything, where even a child could tell how it is done better, should be also managed by Maya with a few lines of coding)

2.)

It should be possible to move and transform the imageframe itself (like the place2D-texture-node does in a very intricate way) in the UV editor.

At the moment we have to change the UVlayout (destructive workflow and unintuitive) or to play around with number fields in the 2Dplacement node.

All USEFUL texturing softwares (substance, mari etc) have the approach, that you can work with fix UV-layout but move the textures.

If you go once a step further, it would be good to paint simple textures like alpha masks.

To paint a black and white image is so ridiculuous simple today, that I don't understand, why I have to leave Maya to Photoshop or Substance or Mari for such a simple task. (And often after reimport, you see it has to be different and have to do it all again).

And maybe a texture or alpha could be also much better animated this way in far future...

3.) BUG:

If I change in animations the layout, it becomes corrupt. For chached animations this is not solvable and for rigged it has to be skinned again.

This is completely unneccessary and known since years

Here is a link from 2003 !!!  LOL

https://simplymaya.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8872

4.) BUG: UVset editor - set selection not working, see attachement. long-time bug...

Thanks for reading and voting!

p.s. picture are only about the bugs...

[BenediZ]

Typical Example of created square UVshells. After Extruding I have like 100 such elements and it takes hours to sort and distort them.

Reason that I can't use unfold for them: In the Mesh is something non-manifold, so all the tools don't work, even not on good simple faces! (I can't repair it for topology-matching reasons in this project)

But the UV editor and also other modeling tools should not stop or crash, because there is ANY wrong geometry anywhere, instead the tools should work always if possible on the selected faces that are good enough.

[tj.galda]

We've got some nice fixes in mainline right now to address this.  Stay tuned for the next update...

[BenediZ]

Hello, important:

new bug came in Maya 2018.6

I already sent a bug report, but please check it in Maya2019, too:

Transferred UVs stay now invisible in UVeditor

[BenediZ]

and also UV linking seems now impossible with transferred UVs!

How can I revert from Maya 2018.6 to Maya 2018.5 ?  thanks

[BenediZ]

sorry for another post:  UVlinking worked now, but on a huger scene it randomly also didn't work (couldn't make out the reason, it was also with geometry with alembic cache).

The main issue is that the first default UVmap keeps invisible (when it comes from transferred UVSets) in the UVeditor.

And this seems to make things instable the more new nodes come into play: In a big scene it sometimes didn't show any UV neither in UV editor nor in rendering, whichever map was selected or linked.

[tj.galda]

OK, thanks for the posts & pictures.  I'm flagging for our team to review.

[mcginnc]

Hi There - My name is Catherine McGinnis and I work with TJ @ Autodesk - specifically in the QA department. I looked at the Transferring UVs issue you logged and I could also reproduce it in 2018.6 - so it was definitely a regression. I just wanted to let you know we've managed to fix it and intend on getting it into an upcoming release. 

Reading through your post, it looks like there are some other issues that you're encountering but haven't logged. Would it be ok if I spoke directly with you to get these logged (with reproducible workflows) so that our developers can look into them?

[BenediZ]

Hi mcginn,

many thanks.

The other issues could be only a result from that and I wasn't able to reproduce it.

I remember that when I once exported in FBX file format to Substance Painter a simple geometry, that had UV linking, randomly was invisible or when rendering in Vray it sometimes was invisible.

And I remember that it worked, when restarting Maya again or tried to import a second time. Just like a loose connection 😉

If you want to test it, I recommend to take a bigger geometry than this cube, transfer UVs (like with the cube example), rename UVsets, change order of UVsets and at the end reference it into another scene and check if it's ok there.

And maybe once export 5 or 6 of such meshes as one FBX2018 to substance painter and just check if they are visible there, when loaded.

I can imagine that this had "only" to do with the lost connection and will be solved, when the connection is reliable.

- Another "soft issue" I saw, that I could not see the attached textures in the UVeditor anymore (without any UVlinking or other UVsets involved).

Normally if you select an object, then it shows reliable the texture, but a few times it did not show it, whichever button I pressed in the UV editor. If you did not experience this, I can try to watch, if I experience this once again.

I had this today once, then I created a different object (which worked as expected), then when I selected again the original object, this worked then, too 😉

- Very similar to that: I rendered a test sequence in Vray and from a certain point a texture did not show up in rendering, only when starting rendering exactly at the frame. If that is interesting, I can try to find the file and check out if it does the same reproducable again (but that's in this case only with Vray...).

All the best

[BenediZ]

+ suggestion:

ability to mirror a texture