I was looking at LiveWire's metroid model, where he also
shows the mesh flattened in 2D, for adding textures to
different parts of the body. Is it possible to generate
these flattened meshes automatically in, say, 3DSMax6?
They'd be a handy for visualisation for an artist, and
the finished texture could be mapped back to the right
mesh vertices.
I agree with da Styles... there are some techniques that help with unwrapping, but you will still need a manual component to get paintable control. I reccomend practicing a lot using the old unwrap techniques so you get a good feel for how uvs work.
I will post a quick uv technique on another thread for you if your interested.
If you want to unfold a model that already has UVS into the shape of the uvs, look up how to paste vertex data in the channel info tool. I use this for when I have part textured a character and need to shuffle the UV layout... I paste the model into a flat plane, then edit poly it into the new layout, then render it so that I have the old parts in the new places. -its pretty fiddly stuff though :o)
After watching some discreet videos about 6 months ago - I had an inkling to setup an automatic unwrapping tool using reactor cloth simulation.
After many hours of tweaking ive pretty much got it to the point whereby you can take your section of mesh - define where you want your seem, and throw it into the simulation which has a wind modifier, some gravity, a solid flat mesh 'wall'.
The simulation blows your mesh ( it now reacts like a piece of cloth would under some high wind ) up against the flat wall, and by tweaking the 'rubberyness' factor you can get some near results albeit slightly stretched.
Not bad for an almost instant job - but still its not as fast as the traditional tools imo. Like Dave said - once youve got the hang of the traditional uvw tools - uvw really is a quick and painless ( maybe ) process.
i saw that video - it loked like fun, if imperfect. in the end it looked like it's still a quick fix. did you find it useful? or was there enough re-adjusting afterwards that it didnt save that much time anyway?
in a video tutorial by [url="http://www.poopinmymouth.com"]Ben Mathis[/url] he uses a third party program that adjusts the uvs based on the proportions of the actual faces. does a very good job too! you still have to define the inividual pieces, and you will want to adjust a bit afterwards for packin, but otherwise it looks like a great program.
Yeah, in his vid Mathis uses Right Hemisphere?s DeepUV just for its relax tool. I tried the demo of it and it?s awesome. Once you?ve unwrapped the mesh, instead of fiddling around trying to reduce the stretching you just jump over to deep UV and hit relax, then back to Max and you?ve got perfectly relaxed UV?s with no stretching. Saves a bundle of time.
But like everyone said earlier, in the end there is no real alternative to manually unwrapping the uv?s and packing them exactly how you want. Its just another skill that game artists are required to master.
The original question, though garbled, was whether automatic
uv mappers existed (I wasn't sure). This DeepUV sounds good-
especially since it doesn't distort the texture, although the
consensus seems to be that it's best to map things manually.
kingofdaveness: the tutorial you mention would be useful
to many on Sumea, although it'll probably be a while before
I'd get to work through it as I'm more of a coder (though
sometimes I have a dabble with a bit of rendering).
What you're asking is kind of confusing, so I hope I'm able to answer; sorry if not [:)]
You're basicly referring to a mesh's unwrapped uv(w) coordinates. To texture any mesh (besides procedurally in xyz space), you need to unwrap your mesh like that. It's the coordinates that tells how to project a 2d image onto a 3d mesh.
So, to answer your question, There's many automatic uv generation tools and apps; max has a count of 3 different individual methods (plus the many different options within those methods). Problem being, virtually every one of these utilities and methods produce innefficient, irrational, and messy uv's making them pretty much unusable for painting any texture. It may be good as a base to start stitching panels togethor, but other than that, automatic uv generation is bad. very bad [:)]