UV mapping suggestion

[Shrike]

There seems to be one thing that is extremely hard to do per hand but can not be automated

 

 

Problem:

The thing is with island packing, if you want a good distance for the larger chunks, the small objects do eat a very disproportionate amount of space on the UV

> See image

As you can see on the image, or you may know, there are always a ton of tiny pieces, which are indeed small in your model and then proportionally small in the UV.

The island distance is good for the larger chunks but extremely inefficient for the small islands.

 

Improvement:

These small things could in basically all cases have factor 2 to 10x times the size and texture resolution with just using the existing space:

Manual improvement on some objects (extremely tedious and time consuming):

 

 

Suggestion:

Please add a curve for final island packing size + island distance based on original relative island size,
this could make UV packing far more efficient and make use of a ton of unused/wasted resolution for the smaller islands.

 

 

 

Edited August 27, 2019 by Shrike

[blackant Master]

try to avoid to have this singles polys everywere on your uv map, this is also time consuming better a better way to keep space.

i agrea there is something to do to improve it in the spacing 

[pickers]

I hope they can give us for UV mapping:

 

1) better rotation tools. (exampe shift +left arrow to slowly turn in left direction.. or space to enter rotation angle based on the original unwrap)

2) allowing strip tool to be use for "mostly" quads islands. Currently only quad based islands are allowed to be stripped (pun intended).

3) correction orientation (z-up) when copying and pasting islands in UV map. Right now it is all over the place. Have to add cuts to make sure the orientation stays correct.

 

I am spending more time squeezing UV space than manual retopo or hard sculpting.

[Shrike]

I try to make everything I can see into connected islands as much as I can (also to save vertices) but there are always a ton of tiny faces left.

Not to forget, many islands are just tiny in comparison. If I have some screws and bolts, I am essentially throwing away the possibility of having them all at 5x the resolution just because its 
so tedious of scaling up unending tiny islands