In the cold light of day, they were found wanting...

Hello there pumpkins, another day another dollar, and I'm churning out this old cobblers again. More cheesey tools from the hot caldron of scripto for you. This time it's an addition to the good, yet strangely incomplete, unwrap modifier in version 5.

As you will be aware, a few big changes were made to the unwrapper this time around, including the addition of subobjects and auto-unwrapping options (thank the maker!). And yet some old trusty tools had simply vanished. Where were the hide and freeze? eh? eh? - and you don't know. Still, I thought, that's the price of progress, you can't have everything. Or can you? While poking around at some of the things you probably shouldn't, I managed to crash the unwrapper. This script popped up, which turned out to be the little panel at the bottom of the main window. Who knew? So, a few minutes later I had my own little panel strapped to the side of the window and an evil grin on my face. It's time to give the people what they want, I thought.

Enter the dame...

Contained herein are the tools that I think you will need on any big unwrapping job. The auto stuff is pretty good, but unwrapping is an art as important as the building itself. If you don't have the tool you can't do the job - am I right?

 

The new panel that straps to the side of the main unwrap window. You will also notice that the OLD PANEL HAS GONE! Do not frett, because it has now been integrated in to mine.So let's start at the top.... The little button at the top left will reduce the whole shebang down to a mini version. Sort of like a minimize option. Click it and it reduces down to this:- The "<" button will choose the dock side of the panel, left or right. The "?" button displays version and contact info. Now, underneath you'll find instructions on how to use all these wee marvels.
	To start off your going to need to align stuff. That's what these do. Align vertically, horizontally and both at the same time. The diagonal one is to striaghten (line of best fit)
	Space evenly, hmmm wonder what they do? U, V and UV
	<"center">This is a replacement for the dump UV script that lurks somewhere in the samples. Who can find it there? If there is stuff selected then it just dumps that stuff (after asking you of course). Choose preset sizes from the list or type your own. One thing to note is that if your base object is an editable poly then you'll get quads an all. But if your using editable mesh then you'll get triangles. Anything that goes into the unwrapper will dump ok.
	This is a tool that exists in the script part of the modifier but has never had any UI. It was in there in V4.x but now it's got it's day in court. Use it just like the relax mod for meshes.
	Now this one's gonna be a bit tricky to explain. When you use the new cut and paste feature of the unwrapper, sometimes you don't get the result that you expect. It may come out upside down or with a big stretch in it. That's ok, it's just the the vertex order of the face you copied from and the face you copy to are different. Now you could move the verts around to fix the problem or you could use this tool. The rotate buttons shuffle the index order of the face around ie if the face run {1,2,3} click the button and it'll run {3,1,2} in effect rotating the face. The two mirror tools only work in face mode and if the face is a quad. It's not possible to index mirror a face that has more that 4 verts in it (trust me)
	Some tools to do some standard deformations. Skews and tapers. The centre point block allows you to pick the deform centre point (really?? you don't say!). You'll notice that the bend is greyed out. This is because I can't find any good bending code! If you can help out with this then give me a bell.
	This will help you out if you use the new freeform gizmo. It snaps the centre (note the spelling!) point to one of the predefined corners or sides.
	This allows numerical entry of scaling and translating factors. You'll get a warning if you try and do a scale of 0.0 in any direction, but you can still do it if you want to. It also has presets for rotation of 45, 90 and 180 degrees, mirror functions and nudge options for precise placement. Now don't say I don't listen ;)
	You know when you've detached a load of faces from an object and you go to the unwrap and find lots of floating verts just hanging around? Well "clear unused" recycles these points and clears them away. "Sel open edges" does what it says on the tin. You must have verts or edges or faces that lie on an open edge for this to find them. 0 to 1 fit scales the selected faces so that they fill exactly the mapping area and are centred
	tile tools is the newest section. Tools for getting the dimensions of the selection (including maxUV, minUV, width and height) centre selections in either U, V or U & V and scale the selection to a max tiling size, with the option to keep aspect.
	These are all the options (nearly) from the old panel, and a few more besides. You should find what you need here.
	And last off all are the sub object selection buttons and the soft selection.
You will also see that some new icons have appeared in the main window. They were switched off in Max 5.x, but I switched them back on! They are (from left to right) Grow selection Shrink Selection Soft Sel Falloff Type Soft Sel Space (xy/uv) Soft Sel Distance Break Target Weld Weld Selected Show/Hide Freeze/Thaw

Boss the presidents been shot!...

To get this script to work you need to place it in your "UI\macroscripts" dir, the bitmap files need to go in "ui\icons". Now you'll notice that it replaces a default script. I can't alter this as the modifier calls this named script directly - so back up the original first. Next time you use the unwrapper it should magically appear on the upper right side of the main window. It will also knock you straight into subobject mode, so no more exiting from the unwraper when you click a face because you forgot to set sub object (you silly billy)

ICONS

I want to be clear about this this time, as loads of people seemed to have trouble. Put uvtools_24i.tga into your "ui\icons" and delete uvtools_24i.bmp (not strictly needed as now I've added a date check on as well) and the script will build the proper icon file to match your background colour. If you ever change your background colour just delete the uvtools_24i.bmp file, and next time you start max the icons will match again. da da!

This script was first released on the discreet web board, but a few bug fixes have gone in since then - so lob that version and git this yall.

Any suggestions for add ons or bugs, send em in.

Release history:-

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