Hi folks,

I was just wondering about user-friendly ways of distributing alternative UVs for figures. Just think of all the remapped Vickies that take textures made for other Vickies. If I'm not mistaken, the usual way of distributing such modified figures uses diffs or encoded files that have to be restored against the original figure files using RTEncoder or Objaction Mover. Wouldn't it be much easier to just distribute the UVs without the geometry and use Python scripts to load them into an existing figure?

The main reason though I'm interested in this is that there's obviously a discrepancy between what's best in UV mapping for the 'traditional' way of texturing via Photoshop and the more 'modern' way that would use a 3d painting application. For the traditional method, seams have to be avoided at all cost, whereas for the 3d method, seams are usually fine and the focus is on avoiding distortion wherever possible. This would suggest that new figures should be equipped with two alternative UV mappings - one that supports the traditional and one that supports the modern way.

In this thread, Cage posted a script demonstrating how new UVs can be plugged into an existing actor by basically creating a clone of the original geometry with the new texture information added and replacing the old geometry with that clone. I was wondering if a similar scheme could be used to apply a new UV mapping to a complete figure. I imagine there would be two scripts: one to extract pure UV information actor by actor and writing it into a special file, and another to read a file created by the first script and replace the UVs of the current figure. This shouldn't be too hard to implement, but I wonder what people think about the time and space efficiency, or if there would be other potential problems that I can't see at the moment.

Or, of course, maybe it's been done already and I would just be wasting my time. :biggrin:

Thanks for any input.

Cheers,
O.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.