I said he'll flip you, flip you for real
Mapping the bane of the 3d modelers existence. What a pain they are to understand, let alone setup. Well don't ye fret my little one because once more I come to the rescue with tools of joy to wipe away your tears of dispare (pretty flowery eh?) Wouldn't it be good if you could use your favourite UV layout on that new model your building - yes it would! Thats why we now have "Mapthief". A small util that allows you to use the unwrap information from another object and project it on to a new one. ah, Looks like, a lot of china
"So how does it work then?" I hear you chant. Ok, here's the skinny. Take an object, the lower poly the better. Unwrap it any way you like. Build you spanko highpoly object, place the low poly object around the high one. Then project the mapping from one to the other. Installation is a sinch, you can put the script anywhere you like because it's a util not a macroscript.
A quick run down of the controls. The source area is where you pick the lowpoly gizmo object. The destination area is where you pick the high poly object. The next section requires a little explanation on how mapthief works. What it does is take every set of poly's on the source object and turn them into planar mapping gizmo's, just like on the standard UVW map modifier. But it still has to know which faces on the high poly object to use with which mapping gizmo. It does this by using mat id's. You can set up a material that has the same number of material slots as the object has poly's (ie a cube would have 6 material slots) use this on your low poly object and on your high poly object. You can then see what faces will use what when it gets mapped. You can use the "Guess assignment" button to get map thief to try and choose the Id's for you, with some clever jiggery pokery. What it does is cull the high poly object based on the "bias angle" and then, on the faces that are left, does an "as the crow flies" distance check between the centres of the faces. The face that is closest gets assigned an Id. "This sounds complicated, could do it all for us?" - you ignorant fool! of course not. I tried this first, to come up with a mathematical way of picking what face to map with what. Unfortunately mapping is an artistic process, and there's no way I can guess how you would like to map it. Everyone would want to do it a different way. Have you ever seen that computer they invented and gave loads of knowledge about painting?. Then they let it go off and paint stuff that was supposed to be good. Take my word, it wasn't. Artistic choices are uniquely human, and based of a thousand parameters. I couldn't simulate anything like that. So instead I do a quick bodge, then let you choose exactly how you would like it done. You can set Id's in any way you like, whatever you find quickest. But I did include a paint button, so you don't have to keep switching back and forth between utility and modify. When you've set your Id's press the "remap" button to set the mapping. and like that, he's gone
Here we go then, on a quick run through....
here is a cube that has been unwrapped. It has a "multi material" on it. With 6 id's each one on a different side. Each one also has a different colour so it's easy to see.
The six sides have been layed out like this. Four sides unfolded along the bottom, and the top and bottom are the two squares up top. Once this has been done you can save it away and use it every time you need this mapping. And what will we apply this to? The good ole teapot of course.....
collapse this down to an editable mesh, at the moment it only works on meshes, not
polygon objects.
Now press the "guess assignment" button and you get this....
Sort of right, but because a lot of the calculation is based on distance, and the box doesn't really match the teapot very well, the shortest distance isn't always the side you would like for mapping purposes. So, using this as a base, go and set the Id's as you'd like them to be. With something like this it only takes a few minutes.
This is now ready to be mapped. Some artistic choices have been made here. Like only mapping the spout and handle from left and right, and missing out top and bottom. Press the "Remap" button and mapthief goes off and remaps the teapot based on your choices.
And this is what you get. The teapot layed out like the box was. Each of these chunk is self contained and fully welded. The W dimension is also catered for, but may not be quite correct because of all the different distances involved. A bit of scaling will fix that if you need W for some reason.
And that's all there is. After a while I imagine you'll build up a library of low poly mapping templates ready to use. Imagine having your favorite quake mapping all set up to apply in a few minutes, or a really good head layout ready to go. ok marketing schpeel over! Just remember to keep your low poly object really low. The lower the better. You can put as many faces in them as you like, but you get better results with fewer joins with lower poly's.
Release history:-
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