Unwrap UVW

[Chris MacDonald]

Hey guys/girls,

 

I don't often use the Unwrap UVW in max, but have had some experience with it. One thing I am always finding is that I always end up wasting a lot of texture space because it will only render out a square UVW template. Is it possible to render out a rectangular UVW template? I.e. change the dimensions.

 

See picture.

 

 

Any help is much appreciated. No plugins though, please. I'm using vanilla 3ds max for this as I don't use the feature often enough to warrant spending money on it.

[Scott Schroeder]

In the UVW Unwrap dialog go to Options-Preferences and set your display preferences to something other than square, ie 1024x512. Then when you render your template, you'll also need to set your dimensions as the render dialog doesn't follow the display settings all of the time.

[Chris MacDonald]

Sounds good, however all it seems to have done is stretch the UV templates to double their previous length? Or am I required to scale them by hand so they fill the page?

 

If so, is there any way of scaling numerically? I only want to double the scale along the vertical axis and then I'll have exactly what I need.

[Scott Schroeder]

Yeah, you are right it does scale them more than it should. I've only had it do non-square when I've already loaded the non-square texture into the material so it does a better fit.

 

There are a lot of good tips in this forum post; http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=87835

[jasonstewart]

I do it differently.

 

So lets say I want my texture to be 2048x1024. I use UV Unwrap like normal but in preferences I set the grid to on and set it to a spacing of 1. Then I can see where 0-2x0-1 UV space would be and I just use that as the boundary. Once I have what I want I add a UVW xform modifier to compact the layout back to 1:1 space (in this case enter .5 into the U tile box). Once that is done I add a UV Unwrap on top, check to see if everything is inside the 0-1 UV and save the template out as 1024x2048 and it will look just like it did in the first UV Unwrap. If you need to make a change just go back to the 1st UV Unwrap and the changes will be updated throught he two modifiers and just export again.

 

I like this method because you are not working with UVs that are all smushed and you dont have to add a correct aspect ratio texture beforehand.

 

Hope that helps.

[Chris MacDonald]

Thanks for the help chaps, much appreciated.

 

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