Snowdragon & UVFairy
I've been optimizing UV maps to cut seam count while keeping texel density high. How do you balance full manual control with the speed of auto‑mapping?
You can't really trade speed for full control without losing your geometry’s soul. If you want that high texel density and perfect symmetry, you must do it by hand—think of each seam like a line of poetry. Auto‑map is a shortcut that will scatter your faces, break your grids, and make the texture look like it was baked in a hurry. Pick a small area, map it meticulously, then copy the pattern. Speed comes from practice, not from letting the software do the heavy lifting for you.
Your approach works, but it’s slow. I prefer to start with a quick auto‑map to get the layout, then tweak only the most critical seams. That way I keep control without wasting time.
I see why you’d want a quick start, but that first auto‑map is like a draft of a poem—you get the shape, but the rhythm is off. If you’ll hand‑fix only the critical seams, be sure you first test the texel density across the whole layout. The risk is that the auto‑map leaves uneven texels, so the “critical” seams you fix might not solve the underlying distortion. A better way is to lay out a clean, manually tiled grid, then use that as a template. Once you’ve got the geometry in place, you can snap the auto‑map onto it and adjust only the few seams that truly need it. That keeps your control and your speed in balance.
Your template idea keeps the geometry intact, but it adds an extra step you can avoid by using a low‑poly reference for the auto‑map and then projecting onto the high‑poly. That way you get a clean distribution before you begin hand‑editing, and you can lock the critical seams right away. The trick is to check the texel density after each tweak, not only at the end.