Suggestions and opinions concerning UVs and UDIMs by Robert Rioux aka Blender Bob.

riouxr@gmail.com Blenderbob on the dev forum.

There are 3 major issues that I would like to talk about concerning UVs.

1) The way the UDIMs are implemented and how to x it

2) How UVs need to be adapted for today’s reality (huge mesh, many parts)

3) Live link

The UV system was developed before the functionality of UDIMs and it now needs to be
adapted to be more e cient.

The rst iteration of the UDIMs in Blender had it wrong. UDIMs were considered as a
continuous image sequence that starts at 1001. I made a Blender Bob clip about it to explain
that UDIMs are not an image sequence but more like tiles. They don’t need to start at 1001 and
they don’t need to be continuous. So this has been xed.

SUGGESTION: One feature that would be awesome, and that I have never seen before, would
be to have a node in the shader editor where you could lter UV tiles for color corrections. So if
my van is blue and I want it green, I could have a node where I would lter UDIMs 1001 to 1004
and any color corrections would be applied only to these tiles.

SUGGESTION: Having too many UDIMs is a problem in Blender when you want to display the
textures in the BG. If you have 20 UDIMs with 4k textures, Blender will have to load them all
and it would become unusable. The solution for that is the use of mipmapping, so that a
smaller resolution would be displayed and ‘scaled’ as needed. Apparently, Brecht is on the
case and that’s awesome. Another cool feature that I have never seen before would be to
display the image only behind the UDIM where the UV/vertices/face/islands are selected.

PAPERCUT: Blender can discover automatically image and UDIM sequences. The issue is that
if it nds an image sequence that starts with 1001, it will assume it’s a UDIM sequence, in
priority. Here’s the thing. In VFX, it’s industry standard to start CG scenes at frame 1001. This
allows to make the shot longer before if needed and/or gives you 1000 frames for simulation
run up. So if I want to load a BG plane for the camera, my plate will start at 1001. But Blender
will consider it a UDIM sequence and sets it as so. Why would anyone want to load a UDIM
sequence as a camera BG plane? On the shader side, sometimes we need to project the plate
on an object and we get the same problem there. The sequence will be loaded as UDIMs. The
only way to avoid that is to manually check o the “discover UDIM” option. And if you made
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the mistake of loading an image sequence as UDIM and you want to change the settings to
image sequence instead, you lose the sequences duration.

The main issue

Many “missing” or wanted functions can be compensated with addons but they all have the
same underlying issue and that comes from Blender itself: You need to be in edit mode in
order to manipulate UVs. So that makes me realized that Blender’s UV system was developed
with the idea of working on one object at a time. So you do the table, then you do the chair,
etc. But when you deal with more complex issues, it becomes problematic because in order to
layout your islands or UDIMs, you need to turn ALL objects in edit mode. Then you may end up
with an unmanageable number of vertices on the screen if you were in vertex selection instead
of faces. And if you are in face mode, then the mesh becomes orange and that doesn’t help
either. Oops!

The van is a simple model. Still kind of manageable. On the Predator ship, we had to deal with
200 UDIMs. The ship was so heavy that it would be impossible to manage it in edit mode.

Here’s my suggestion, and it’s a big one. We need a UV mode!

When you select a mesh in UV mode, the islands will

appear in the UV editor but we don’t need to see the
actual UVs to keep it cleaner and faster. Only the outline
is visible in the viewport so that you don’t see the vertices
or have an orange cast over everything or the wireframe.
It’s super clean and you can clearly see what you are
doing. And way easier for the graphic card.

Then, if you roll over an island in the UV editor, it highlights in

both UV editor and viewport). This is super useful when you
are dealing with very complicated meshes. A must. Once you
have tried it, you can’t go back.

If you select an island and change to UV, edge or face, then

the UVs are displayed in the UV editor but only on what you
are editing. And this is NOT the way Maya works. (Did I say
Maya? I meant, the other software). We never need to see
anything other than the outline in the viewport. If you need the
wireframe for some reason, you can just turn in on in the
viewport). These changes would make both the viewport and
UV editor way faster and cleaner too. This UV mode would
remove the need (do we actually need it?) for a live link mode
that is confusing to use and keeps making you lose what was
selected when turning it ON and OFF. And some UV addons
have issues with live link thing.

 Other missing important features:

-The ability to assign a random color per island, just like the random display in the viewport.
Very useful. For both UV editor and viewport.

-The ability to display island borders with a thicker line. This is helpful when you want to make
sure all the parts are properly connected. Example:

Here on the left it looks like everything is good but when contours are tuned ON you can clearly
see that they are actually two separated islands.

-Need a better way to move islands from one UDIM to another than going Move, 1. The cursor
keys are the best way to do this.

-Need a way to verify that no islands are crossing between two UDIMs

-All the tools in the “UV toolkit” addon are important and missing from Blender

-The ability to show the reversed UVs with a di erent color. Note: ipped UVs is not the same
as ipped normals. So just like normal display. Blue OK, red bad.

-A way to see corresponding edge my color code. You select an

edge that is on the border of an island. It gets a colored highlight
and the same edge on another island, if that’s the case, gets the
same highlight.

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 -A texel density tool that will allow sample a textel density (or manually set it) and apply it to
another island(s). Important, when scaling, we want two possible options. A) per island B)
average on the selected island so it keeps the same layout, just scale them. This is available in
Texel density addon (with many more options but it’s a must and should be part of Blender.

-Highlight in viewport when rolling over islands. Very useful with complex geometry.

-Ability to select islands from the viewport (UV mode?) In another software, you have a select
pie menu that allows you to select vertices, edges, faces like in Blender but also UVs and, on a
second level (annoying), UV shells.

-A checklist tool that will verify either selected or all UVs for potential problems and highlight or
select the o ending UVs/island. This would include:

1) ipped UVs

2) UDIM border crossing

3) geometry that doesn’t have any UVs

4) islands in negative UVs space (will create issues in substance)

5) textel density checker, make sure they are all the same (with a tolerance)

6) overlapping UVs

7) geometry with 0 surface area

8) non-manifold geometry

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 You don’t want to do them all at the checks at the same time. One by one so that the user can
x them as they are agged.

-UV projection manipulators. Right now, if you want to use a plane, cylindrical or cubic
projection, you have no visible way to move/scale/rotate them in the position you need them to
be.

There are two ways to do UV projections. One will bake the UVs, like it’s the case right now in
Blender. The other way is non-destructive. Similar to using an object as texture coordinates but
if I use, for example, a plane. The plane doesn’t really represent the projected area. You
actually need to make some changes in the location and scale to make it match the plane. And
you need to make that plane visible as wireframe in the viewport so it’s not in the way and you
want to make sure it won’t render either. And that only works for a plane but it wouldn’t work
for a cylindrical or spherical projection.

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 -Because Blender now uses Eevee instead of open GL when in texture mode, it makes
Blender less e cient as it needs to compile more complicated shaders. If you use the solid
preview instead, it doesn’t take into consideration the UV mapping settings. Apparently, it was
working in 2.79. (This one comes from one guy at the o ce.)

So if you are in this mode, the fastest way to display textures, any changes in the UV mapping
node will not be considered. Bug of feature?

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