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Any artists here? What do you use for uv-painting?

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x4000:
I am very frustrated at the moment. ;)

The reason is that I basically want to be able to paint textures onto faces of meshes, and then set the uvs in some form of graphical fashion pretty easily.  Ideally I'd be able to pull from an existing palette of packed textures in one atlas, and apply those.  It doesn't seem like this sort of thing would be an uncommon task, and there are indeed many tools that exist for doing this sort of thing in the most roundabout ways ever.

Basically the choices tend to be:
1. Awesome unique texture that's not going to batch of course.
2. Overly-simplified texture with no uvs.

Granted, what I'm actually referring to here is simply a uv editor, since literally that's all it would be setting.  If I had a few weeks I could code something up myself, to be honest, but it would be a real time sink and not very polished or usable I'm sure.  There has to be a tool out there that is well-polished for this sort of thing.

Blender and Maya don't seem to really get at this sort of thing well, at least not that I've found.  We have ZBrush and Mudbox and those are great for doing custom painting, and obviously there's something like substance painter that's even better.  There are a variety of tools in the unity asset store that kinda-sorta get at this.  SabreCSG is probably the closest to what I want, but it only works on its own "brushes," not on arbitrary meshes.  I kinda-sorta like the uv mapping tools in ProBuilder, but it's a lot more time-consuming to use than I feel like it can be.  It at least can be used on arbitrary meshes, so it's a method of last resort, but it's really not my favorite way to handle things.

It really seems like there ought to be a simple tool out there that does this without being clunky to use or costing an arm an a leg (though even something that works and costs an arm and a leg is preferable to nothing).

Draco18s:
#NotAnArtist
I've used LithUnwrap when I've had to do uv stuff, it's suuper basic and doesn't have the best/most usable UI, but it works really well for relatively simple objects (no doughnuts, grabbing only the faces you want is a pain).

x4000:
Yeah, that kinda-sorta gets at the task, but all of the individual faces are connected there, which I wouldn't want.  The way that a lot of tools handle it is having each face disconnected and mapped arbitrarily (which when you're dealing with the raw float data is how it's stored).  Usually when I think of uv-unwrapping, I think of continuous surfaces where you're trying to map something to it in an aligned way, or want to draw on the unwrapped texture, rather than having face-independent uv coordinate setting.

I should probably look into uv unwrapping tools more to see if there's one that happens to have the other functionality, though.  Thanks for the thought on that!

Draco18s:

--- Quote from: x4000 on September 14, 2016, 11:20:42 am ---but all of the individual faces are connected there, which I wouldn't want.

--- End quote ---

They're not, actually.  In fact, keeping connected vertices connected is actually a right pain.  I can't ever use the arbitrary "drag to move" feature because then the verts end up offset from each other by microns and welding just goes "AVERAGE THESE" with no "align to top" like operation and things end up slightly skewed.  It might only be by a tenth a pixel, but you can still tell.

But yes. It's very much a "it will get the job done" program not a "breeze to use" program.

x4000:
Ah, that sounds morel iike what I need, then, heh.  Still a pain and a half, though, for sure.

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