A number of small improvements and new features have been added to make everyday UV mapping easier. These features range from more advanced drawing, smarter tools that use mesh vertex information, to a new UV Mapping panel and code, and UV-editor tools similar to some well known Edit Mode tools. The code was written by Jens Ole Wund and Brecht Van Lommel.
The different UV Mapping modes are now accessible from the new 'UV Calculation' panel in the Edit Buttons. It contains all the settings, so no popups will appear anymore when unwrapping with the U key. 'From Window To Sphere' and 'From Window To Cylinder' are no longer available, in the U key window. Instead, it is now possible to define how Cylindrical and Spherical unwrapping should work in the UV Calculation panel
'Draw Faces' in the Image Window View menu, enables drawing of faces as known in the 3D View in Edit Mode. This is particularly useful for quickly spotting overlapping faces.
'Draw Shadow Mesh' in the same menu, enables drawing of the edges of faces that are not selected in the 3D View.
For the UV Editor, the vertex color, vertex size, and face color are now themeable in the Themes section of the User Preferences.
In the new UV Calculation panel, the 'No Edges', 'Draw Edges' and 'All Edges' settings respectively enable drawing in the 3D View, in Face Select Mode, of no edges, all edges that are on top, or all edges.
With 'Active Face Select' enabled, a RMB click will select a face, and make it the active face. This can be toggled on/off by pressing C.
With 'Stick UVs to Mesh Vertex' enabled, a RMB click will not only select one UV, but also all the UVs that belong to the same mesh vertex. 'Stick Local UVs to Mesh Vertex' works in the same way, but only select the UVs that are 'connected', meaning they are within a 5 pixel range of the first selected UV. These options are enabled by respectively pressing Ctrl C and Shift C.
For all three of these options a special icon is displayed in the bottom left of the UV editor. Note that 'Active Face Select' and 'Stick UVs to Mesh Vertex' can also be combined.
'Unlink Selection' will based on the current selection, only leave those UVs selected, of which the faces are fully selected. As the name implies, this is particularly useful to unlink faces and move them elsewhere. The hotkey is Alt L.
'Select Linked UVs' works similar to 'Select Linked' in the 3D View. It will select all UVs that are 'connected' to currently selected UVs. The difference with the 3D view is that in the UV Editor, UVs are connected 'implicitly'. Two UVs are considered selected if the distance between them is no longer than 5 pixels. The hotkey is L.
The screenshots should give you a good idea of how these features work. The topmost image is the starting situation.
A new 'Weld / Align' tool was added (hotkey is W). Once you are in Weld / Align mode, you can press W to Weld (snap together UVs), X to align the UVs on the X axis, Y to align the UVs on the Y axis.
In Grab and Scale Mode, pressing X and Y toggles constrained grabbing or scaling over the X axis or Y axis. As X and Y were previously used for mirroring in Scale Mode, a new Mirror tool (M key) was added, with a popup asking over which axis to mirror.
Proportional Editing was added to the transform tools. It works the same way as in Edit Mode. O toggles Proportional Editing on/off, Shift O lets you choose the Fallof type, Smooth or Sharp.
The 'Stitch' tool snaps UVs together by mesh vertex. As the name implies, it can be used for stitching together two separately unwrapped parts. 'Limit Stitch' works in the same way. The difference is that it only snaps together UVs within a given range. The default limit is 20 pixels. Its advantage over 'Stitch' is that it prevents UVs, that are supposed to stay separate, from being stitch together. You can see on the screenshots how Limit Stitch prevents wraparounds when stitching together two parts of a Cylinder.
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