Blender 3 UV Tools Improved -- FINALLY!!!

hello ladies and gentlemen it's mike here at game from scratch and today we are talking about uv mapping which is probably one of the least preferred things that 3d artists have to do and when it comes to blender even less so because blunder's uv mapping tools well they're not the best so what we're talking about today though is an improvement to them that came about because of google's summer of code now if you've never heard of google summer of code basically every uh spring google has basically a giant list of open source projects where they will pay students through the summer to work on those projects so if you're interested if you're a student summer code i cover it every year when applications are open they sponsor a number of different projects as you can see things like audacity are in here and of course so is blender and then in terms of blender uh there were a number of different projects sponsored one of the other ones that just came about was an improvement to the the visuals the video sequence editor the non-linear video editing inside of blender but the one we were focusing on today is this one from i'm gonna go with sid all right so sid here uh did uv editor improvements so the project was aimed at improving certain existing uv tool editors and adding some new features to better support uh workflows involving you dim textures now if you do not know a udem texture is basically a way of having multiple texture maps on the same um 3d object we'll look at that very briefly if you don't know in texture mapping i'll give you a very simple primer of what uv mapping is in the first place when we get into blender but this is the project we are focusing on by the way uh it is documented here we will come back to it about what is actually done so this is his final report on what he accomplished and if you want to grab this guy it is a special release here go to the bender the blender branch builds i'll show you a link to get to this one uh it is here uh the uv editor improvements he's also done the edge select support so these are two uh versions now this hasn't been um forked back into blender but hopefully it is because this is some really nice stuff so without further ado let us jump over to blender and here we are with our default cube i'm going to use this to demonstrate everything today so let's drop that down also i'm going to go back to my browser and we're going to not full screen it so you can see my start bar instead of part of the browser window alright so here we are with our 3d object in blender uv mapping is basically the process of taking a 3d object and creating a translation layer so that you can paste a 2d image on a 3d object it is the way that we texture map images in order to do this you obviously need the uv editor so again this is a custom build of blender so here is our object we'll switch over to edit mode and there you see these 2d coordinates correspond to uh vertices and faces and so on in the 3d world so let's look at what has improved due to this summer of code project and they're nice improvements so first off the nicest new one here is if you bring up the tools window and you go to vert the view you'll now notice there is a dynamic grip so you see this grid here in the background as you zoom in by the way it gets more and more uh granular that's another improvement that was done here but we can do is turn on the dynamic grid so see here grid size is one so basically you have a single square and now what you can do is basically improve the grid or resize the grid dynamically and this is useful because we've also got new staffing tools by the way we've also got some improvements to udem so i said i'd explain you dim either earlier on so here we've got four udim settings so now you've got here here here and here so you can do is basically have four sets of uv coordinates for um your textures there's some improvements as far as udims go and we'll get back to those in a second but let's get back to the dynamic grid so with the dynamic grid you can change the uh the resolution of your grid in the background and that goes along with the new snapping tools so turn snapping on you can see here we have a couple of options here so we can have the absolute grid snapping going on right now so when i have these grid tools here if i am grabbing um you know zoom in so you can see so now dynamic zoom is gone so as we zoom in and out it stays with whatever you set here with the dynamic grid so this gives you the ability to do nice precise snapping of your movement so let's go here we'll grab again this one right here and i'll do a move and see here we're snapping now directly to our grid so if i go here and i change the fidelity of our grid again it snaps to it it's going to make doing nice precise movements a such a nicer experience for sure there are a couple of other options when it comes to the snapping here as well so you got incremental and then of course traditional vertices snapping there you can let's see go back here so uh yeah so that's the big new changes here in terms of this new dynamic grid and the grid snapping it's going to make uh precision controls definitely easier to work with another thing we can now do is you can use alt and the arrow keys to snap to the next spot too so i'm pressing alt and then left right up and down and that's another change that's here as well another thing that they did is if you were working on multiple udims so let me go back here so we've got say the four idiom sets you can also now do control oops i didn't mean to so let's grab the whole thing i can do control and arrow movement and you can move the selection between the different uh udem grids which is definitely a nice improvement here as well so if you're working with udams life is going to get so much easier at this point in time let's go back over here and bye bye default cube now what we're going to do is bring in susan all right so we got a monkey going on now and here you'll see we've got a number of uh texture islands in place here uh so let's do island selection mode so here now have this in place well we've got some really neat tools going on now is you can now go in uv and we can now do a pack islands to area so i could take the uv i've got so i've got a selection of uvs going on right now and i could basically just drag out the size i want and boom it will move that uv island into that space so this makes resizing and remapping so let's say we wanted to take this guy move it somewhere else basically again i just go uv and then we do pack islands to area and then i can do a little one right here now you'll notice that actually rescaled it as i did it and you may not want to do that well you'll notice down here we've got some options while doing it you can actually turn that off and it will use a different um algorithm for calculating things unfortunately in this particular case packing area was not big enough for the selected island uh so in that case we would have to do so let's go here uv um pack island area we'll make it big enough so you can have it scale to fit or rotate to fit in the area that you're packing so if you're moving things around this new feature this new uh pack islands to area thing is definitely going to make life a lot easier uh we've also got some changes to the pack island so when you're doing your pack island uh with the selected object you can actually say to the closest you dim now or you can specify you dim so we can have it go to whichever you didn't we want in our series so that's actually another new improvement here as well so it's going to make working with islands a lot it's kind of reorganizing and placing islands of uvs a whole lot easier on the whole and then of course we have the dynamic grid which is going to make snapping uh a lot more flexible in terms of what we can do so let's go over oops wrong video let's go over and take a look at his final results so again we saw most of this now in the pack islands you can have the closest udem and specified udem as options uh the pack island to box area again has two different algorithms to paste out if you got scaling on or off uh we got the new grid for the uh uv so you can when you subdivide in with the default grid or you can turn on the dynamic grid and have tight control over uh the number of squares to have specifically and then of course we've got changes to snapping so we got increment snapping um changes there for subdividing grid the snapping value is decided based on the visible grid for dynamic grid the snapping value is equal to the inverse of dynamic grid size in other words snapping value is equal to the size of one dynamic grid unit and precision snack precision snapping is calculated as 0.5 times the snapping value that is currently being used and then absolute grid snap we saw that in action earlier on uh i told you earlier about the uh new arrow key modifiers so control and arrow keys moves between the udims and then alt arrow keys moves between the dynamic grid units so if you've got the dyn oops keep going back to that that's another video stay tuned for it so if i grab uh let's do a vertex all right so if i grab that guy again with the control we move between udems like so and with alt we move one unit at a time now you'll notice i actually have uh snapping turned off for there so if i turn to absolute grid snap and then we do it alt oh okay i might have done that wrong absolute grid snap increment okay so maybe this one is okay so the alt one actually moves it by uh regardless to this so it moves it by a grid unit so let's move that guy up okay i turned snap i thought it turned snapping off all right so turn that guy out there turn snapping back on and then we'll use alt yeah so it's moving it by a grid unit uh but it's not snapping it directly so the new alt and the various arrow keys moves it this way and then we'll zoom out oops and uh control moves it to the different idioms so if you're working on multiple udems life just got easier with these uv tools uh generally the dynamic grid is going to make life a lot easier to work with youtube tools unfortunately this hasn't necessarily been merged in as of yet we've also got some changes to the edge selection this is actually a different build and it's more of a broad thing so it's not really something i'm going to cover but i'm going to leave this in so the the release notes are available here with some videos showing each thing in action i will also dump a link to this guy directly and to the daily builds in general of course you can build this yourself if you wish now do keep in mind this have not been merged upstream yet so there's no promise that this will make it in to blender 3.x but i don't know why it wouldn't because it's just basically across the board improvements and uv tools definitely is an area where blender could use some love and this is the kind of stuff that the summer code is great because it can take the open source projects that we use daily and they can kind of create these smaller more contained projects for summer students to work on that at the end of the day can have a very tangible influence on um you know the way that we use our tools so this is definitely some nice improvements in blender and i really hope they get merged upstream because these are quite nice and do keep in mind there are other ones that were recently announced so um the blender project ones again the other one that they were talking about here is the changes to the uh video editing timelines so you'll see things like a preview of the strips when you put them in and so on that one i'm not going to cover in a particular video today but it's another project that recently came of age and if you want to check it out there's more details available with that one but today what we're looking at is sid's excellent work in the uv editor and i really do hope these make it upstream soon because they're definitely improvement so let me know what you think of these changes of uv editing and blender or of uv editing in general is it something you despise doing as well let me know comments down below and i will talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 28,887

Rating: 4.9107394 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, Blender3D, GSOC, Game Development, GameDev, Google, Open Source, Snapping, Summer of CODE, Tools, UV, UV Editing

Id: gOfuCxif52k

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021